Thanks for your post littlefish, and especially for the links.

Lots of people think quite clearly, and I'm glad for that. But I'm afraid my thinking isn't so clear; I'm always trying to discern the outlines of what others see so clearly through a haze--oh well, maybe it's just ignorance. I haven't read Deluze nor Deluze and Guattari. It's a little hard to avoid reading about Deluze spending time in discussion here at tribe.net. I also don't have a firm anti-capitalist position.

One of the things that intrigued me about the article I mentioned www.mymacexperience.com/GieslerJCR1.pdf was that it was in The Journal of Consumer Research. I don't read a lot of marketing journals, so maybe the language of French Theory is rather ordinary in them these days; but it struck me as odd. In the same way that this article about the US Air Force studying blogs did www.defenselink.mil/transfor...906b.html

A while back I had my Yahoo Messenger on and got a random message from a Chinese motorcycle salesman in Vietnam. Clearly the guy had had a rough day and was crying in his beer. What he found so difficult was that there were 13 other Chinese motorcycle companies going after the market in Vietnam. Oh and also he was missing his boyfriend terribly and feeling lonely. I know hardly anything about Vietnam or about Chinese motorcycles for that matter. So I was interested in his story. I was curious about how his motorcycles were differentiated from the motorcycles that the 13 other companies were offering in Vietnam.

I pointed out that BMW hosted via Web pages races and journeys of cyclists and did other things to forge solidarity among BMW owners and enthusiasts. I wasn't intentionally being mean, but I recognize stuff like that was hardly his job. His response was that all of the motorcycles were built to look like Japanese motorcycles and that even their names were take-off of Japanese names. Phil Jones in a recent blog post links to a talk by John Seely Brown supplylearner.wordpress.com/2006...rown/ which suggests that Asian cpompanies are rapidly moving to a new model of technological development.

I mention that conversation in re your suspicion about the possibility of a gift system operating with a community of consumers. Brand loyalty is suggestive that something like a gift system operates even within conventional commerce. I do think that P2P exchanges change the commercial landscape. The article maybe doesn't reveal that much, still it's interesting to see that marketers are exploring recent philosophical explorations in their quest to make sense of it.

www.wired.com/wired/archi.../people.html

"Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim."

One of my interests in this particular tribe is was of using alternative money to measure and trade on the "currency of reputation" or what not. I notice that Yahoo Answers has set up a point system to encourage participation and that lots of commercial Web sites collect information about the community of users in various forms of reputation currencies. There's some porno bucks system for porn Web masters that has a great name which I can't remember as much as I try. I haven't figured out how to Google that, and search is my usual solution when I can't remember.

I found the skepticism in Joanne Richardson's paper generally useful. Okay like I say most of the time I'm just trying to see the outlines through the haze. But here's a snippet from that and then a rather off-the-wall comment about it:

"It’s useful to recall that a rhizome is a plant-life. When googling it, more than half the results will point to sites that offer gardening tips. And that might not be the most useful information to have for theorizing social relations. The question about whether the net is or is not rhizomatic should be replaced by other questions about whether and in what ways the internet can promote the autonomy and self-determination of those who use it. It is not a question of rhizomes but democratic structures."

I think "rhizomes" are a metaphor not an analogy. I'm rather more tolerant of drawing homologies from plant life than is Richardson.

Metaphors can be quite useful, but they can also lead research astray. A common metaphor for human immune function is that of "armies mobilized to fend off the alien invaders." Many researchers into immunology have discovered that it really isn't like that, but the metaphor is hard to break free from. "Four Models For Networks" wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/Reading...dels.htm addresses the hunt for metaphor. I'm quite sympathetic to the search for a metaphor, and it seems to me that the crux of the reason for the search is how to explain things without a command from on high? ( "I shit on your revolutionary vanguards!" ) For some reason nonetheless I can't seem to get too enthusiastic over arguments about which metaphor to use; rather more enjoy toying around with various metaphors. And I think that rhizomes are a powerful metaphor.

There are some fragments; not enough to make a pair of Dutchman's breeches, as my grandmother used to say;-) Here are a few links you may find interesting:

YouTube clip of Foulcault/ Chomsky debate www.youtube.com/watch
Part 2 www.youtube.com/watch
Simon Tormey articles homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.t...les.html