What if we were to play with an architecture of participation that at its core has desires/wishes. One that is not driven by what others have done, but by what others will do? This is the differentiating driving force behind Mekwa. "I want you to produce for me and I will produce for you". My thesis argues that if empowered with a structure that focuses on the near future (desires I wish fulfilled) as much as on the near past (what desires were recently fulfilled), users will question the assumed historical authority of their own identity and enter a realm that allows them to better shape it.
I go out at night and see kids posing for the hi5, or facebook picture... I go through hundreds of profiles of 18-24 year olds and realise they are not reacting in a creative way to the content that they themselves produce. The reason being: they are producing content under a very specific format already. It's like taking pictures for a wedding, [acritically] one assumes a certain kind of pose, frame, light... The event now, is not the party, or the holiday, it's Facebook or Myspace... and it already presuposes a set of behaviours that dictate content production.
These social networks are also looking into the future through events. Meet up, Myspace, Facebook... are able to point groups towards common future events where content is produced and then fed back into the machine individually. Still this is very different from empowering each user with a different image of the future before they actually take that picture. Let's see if Mekwa can pull it off with a desire/wish based architecture.
With Mekwa, users will still wander about, consuming what others have produced, but they will react to desires, by producing meaningful content in order to fulfill them. They will carve a path into a future, rather then solely reminiscing on the near past.
