Art, creativity, collaboration, spirituality, identity – early explorers are using virtual worlds to generate the first prototypes for an emerging platform that will allow individuals to interact with each other, create, share and experience in ways that extend, mesh with, overtake, and upend traditional models. The hierarchal corporation is dead.

Media are increasingly “hot” – emotional, personal, transformative. Social and political structures replaced as the youTube and Facebook generation twitters each other, mashes up music and media in their basements, and co-opts brand identities in ways often more powerful than the corporate and advertising oligarchs would ever dare dream.

Virtual worlds become an early lens – refracting, illuminating, bringing into focus the struggles between corporate and legal motivations to own, to earn, to control and win, and the power of individuals to be informed, inform each other, and grab hold of the tools of creation previously restricted to those with the power to flip the chip switch on and off.

The power of collaboration changes everything. To borrow Tapscott’s term, call it Wikinomics. Gary Hamel argues for a flowering of management innovation: “new ways of mobilizing talent, allocating resources, and formulating strategies”.

Kids with a video camera and a laptop become global superstars on youTube, and people attend New Year’s Eve on Facebook instead of in Time’s Square.

The Conceptual Age
Sandy Kearney called this the move from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Virtual worlds, the metaverse, is just one area where this is being played out, but as we enter 2008 with a pipeline of new worlds, and further migration (especially by teens and kids) to virtual spaces, I’d expect to see this played out in increasingly dramatic ways. Economic value, time, productivity, immersion – the migration to virtual worlds, the specific investment by China in developing virtual world infrastructures, and corporations looking to somehow cash in on places where people get “lost” in play combined with the increasingly low-barrier technology will continue to drive development and acceptance of virtual worlds.

Combined with a sudden shift into augmented reality, the combination of immersive worlds and the overlay of virtual worlds on the real, will bring the metaverse to a tipping point, and only issues of interoperability, government interference, and broader economic factors will stall or sidetrack growth while the failures feed rounds of media hand-wringing much like the current spate of “are we over Facebook yet” articles – waves in the media curve, driven primarily by outlets with an interest in preserving the status quo.

The Conceptual Age driven by how we think, feel, work, and interact. Driven by new questions about identity and how it’s shaped. Driven by media that trigger emotive responses additional to left brain thinking. Models of education that extend the classroom and further overturn the didactic method – tomorrow’s leaders as creators and lifelong learners, instructors as mentors and providers of tools for exploration. Collaboration further breaking down barriers of time and geography, and alternate economies governed by virtual currencies.

Welcome to the Conceptual Renaissance
I’ll count on the collaborative content Bible – Wikipedia, for my armchair historian definition of the Renaissance and propose that in addition to youTube, remixing songs in your basement, and the “Web 2.0″ connected, collaborative culture, that virtual worlds hint at a new Renaissance.

I’ve been amazed at the creative output a few thousand residents of virtual worlds can create – whether it’s machima from World of Warcraft or reflective architecture in Second Life. It suggests a return to an era of craftsmanship versus mass production (Anshe Chung notwithstanding), a return to the age of the guild, small societies of thinkers and explorers posing the big questions and prototyping their answers.

Wikipedia highlights several characteristics of the Renaissance:

Humanism
The over-riding goal of humanists, who may be said to have valued the witnesses of reason and the evidence of the senses in reaching the truth over the Christian values of humility, introspection, and passivity, or “meekness” that had dominated European thought in the previous centuries, was to become eloquent in rhetoric. Beauty, a popular topic, was held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God.

The Web 2.0 and virtual worlds value the expression of individual thought, output, and capacity over received orthodoxies, whether from governments, societies, or the coding authorities. Discount role-playing sims if you will, but even Midian City plays into the notion that we are responsible for the creation of our own personas and identity, and that the social norms and rules are changeable, malleable, and can be re-created through environments where the hierarchy of distributed norms is upended to empower individuals to create their own societies.

Artists use virtual world platforms to explore notions of identity, perspective, and value.

Rather than reason, however, the Renaissance of the Conceptual Age may see a meta-philosophy in which reason is brought into balance with emotion. The “feminine corporation” will value support, emotional intelligence, and collaboration over hierarchy and structure – corporations lifting off of individual empowerment, if they’re to survive, and becoming organic, borrowing models from nature and the frontiers of science rather than the mechanistic models of the industrial age.

Art
One of the distinguishing features of Renaissance art was its development of highly realistic linear perspective. To that end, painters also developed other techniques, studying light, shadow, and, famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, human anatomy. Underlying these changes in artistic method was a renewed desire to depict the beauty of nature, and to unravel the axioms of aesthetics

Virtual worlds offer the first widely available platform for creating art in 3 dimensions, and further, art that is highly interactive and involves the user in its co-creation. This is an extension of the trend towards a broader creative commons, one in which creative chunks are reassembled and redistributed, whether through remixing a song, or co-opting a brand to make a counter-statement. The implications for intellectual property ownership have already upended the music and film worlds, but even science is becoming “mashable” through open source initiatives like the Human Genome Project. Technology itself is increasingly open source and driven by APIs. All of these movements shift the modes of creative production – both through the ability to create new perspectives around objects, experiences and environments, and through how these creative “chunks” are distributed and repurposed.

Renaissance self-awareness
The ability to craft persona for ourselves and to explore those persona through a variety of online media, is intensified in virtual worlds. Early issues of identity, trust, virtual world dislocation, and the “strange loop” will continue to open new horizons for how we think and talk about identity. Increasingly, our avatars will exist without our presence and become intelligent agents, much as RSS, twitter and Facebook updates keep us plugged into information streams even when we’re not quite looking. Identity becomes transpersonal, and connected to forms of magic and expression that also have a flip side – retreats, escapes, and being lost in synthetic realities to the exclusion of the physically present.

This Renaissance comes at a price – corporations who will struggle to maintain old models of production and IP, individuals lost in synthetic worlds, people who use virtual worlds to advance causes from darker desires to terrorism training, shifts in economic production to poorly managed virtual economies, a change in language. All of these changes presuppose that the tools to build, host and participate in virtual worlds will continue to improve and become more ubiquitous, and that there will continue to be increasingly compelling reasons why participation in synthetic worlds has a higher “payoff” than ‘real life’. The ability to layer new realities on top of our current one – to walk down a city street and have access to information shadows viewable through new 3D appliances, or to exit reality and enter immersive worlds, gives individuals and stakeholders access to an open-ended toolkit that will augment, supplement, and in some cases replace the ways we currently relate, work, interact and experience.

A Renaissance of concept and creativity, promise and peril.

Reminding me of the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”