The focus of investigation relies on how diversity can live side-by-side, using the individual as a starting point but aiming the study to networked communities. In as much as it is about democratic systems of evaluating decisions, it seeks to understand how platforms layered over digital culture can help intensify the shift towards open collective creations. In contemporaryculture information is a commodity; everything is information, hence, everyhting is traceable. In this constant equation, much of what is critically human ends up being distorted into databases (Brown and Duguid 2002 p.21)However, as Claude Shannon once noticed, any message is one selected from a set of possible messages (cited ny Taylor 2001 p.108) information, in the end, has more to do with improbabilities. Is it possible to process human complexity as simply information? Furthermore, does this binary filter help us understand society beter or does it actually narrow down production and decisions? In the digital world, we are no longer bound to space and time. For this reason, arising forms of delayed and displaced dialogue, along systems for multiple inputs, are main issues to be dissected. Throughout this research I will analyse, step-by-step, how identities - both individual and collective - constitute information, or better put, knowledge, how we manipulate it (or not) and, finally, how attributes brought by new media can enhance the possibilities to inface networked production. This document will walk through different manifestations of such processes, they being in the commercial/economic arena, media art fields or social/political context. Such complex and diverse scope will hopefully map the importance of what I am here naming design platforms, from the web 2.0 community structures to participatory politics. The last layer attributed to these platforms will be mobility, which will be associated with the previos concepts of space and time, but with highlighted importance, especially regarding the realationship between personal and community multiplicity. With a shift to other input interfaces for collective decisions, such as the mobile, a clearer study about how to collect and put together group opinions is required. This might involove looking into how far we can explore such new interface as well as studies about new code syntaxes, which could allow us more flexibility over expression and even decision making.

MA dissertation:Interactive Digital Media