The close relationship between status and reputation in offline communities is based on the ability to recycle one into the other. Status is a base for creating reputation, and reputation is used to enhance status. Thus, large firms use reputation to charge higher prices, the profits from which are then used to invest in activities (e.g., better service and advertising) that create greater reputation. Likewise, individuals acquire greater status by forming alliances with socially powerful actors, but then take care to show that they are loyal and trustworthy—thereby generating a reputation for being a reliable ally that is likely to stand them in good stead when it comes to acquiring more allies.

In virtual communities, however, the connection between formal social, economic, and professional status and status that derives from reputation is much weaker. Individuals cannot easily use their formal status position to generate reputation, and likewise they may find it difficult to convert their reputation into formal status.

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Concrete poetry's utopian pan-internationalist bent was clearly articulated by Max Bense in 1965 when he stated, "...concrete poetry does not separate languages; it unites them; it combines them. It is this part of its linguistic intention that makes concrete poetry the first international poetical movement." Its ideogrammatic self-contained, exportable, universally accessible content mirrors the utopian pan-linguistic dreams of cross-platform efforts of today's Internet; Adobe's PDF (portable document format) and Sun System's Java programming language each strive for similarly universal comprehension. The pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost. Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes "out of print." UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms.

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The Internet is filled with junk and jerks. It is commonplace for inhabitant of the Internet to complain bitterly about the lack of cooperation, decorum, and useful information. The signal-to-noise ratio, it is said, is bad and getting worse.

 

Even a casual trip through cyberspace will turn up evidence of hostility, selfishness, and simple nonsense. Yet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the Internet is not literally a war of all against all. For a student of social order, what needs to be explained is not the amount of conflict but the great amount of sharing and cooperation that does occur in online communities.

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