Thoughts of collaborative computerized-communication based creation

If a group of people would be determined to create music or art or video production or other creative media type together trough groupware software, would the outcome be a much different than if the people would work together in physically in a same room. In normal human-human communication face-to-face communication involves eyes, face and body movements, in communicating trough computer the feedback is usually reduced to simplified text communication unless using a web-camera or michrophone in instant communication. But if a group of people would work towards the same goal in just text based forums, it has to have an effect to the outcome as well.

In the recent years communication and lots of social life (or something replacing it) has moved to the internet forums, facebook and other social media. The time is near, that also the collaborative working and creativity would also start to happen trough groupware software. Some features that would differ from a normal face-to-face working would at least be that choosing the working partners would rather base on the invidual achivements, interests and the so called internet identity, rather than same social or work circles in physical life. So in practically this allows almost everyone everywhere to create anything with anyone, and by finding totally same minded people with new ideas this could lead to somekind of a revolutionary progress in all areas of creative collaborative work.

Imagine a system where a poet for example publishes a new poem in the certain froupware software. And then it innovates a guitarist in an other country to compose a melody to it. And then maybe a pianist in a third country either to continue from the guitarists work or to create their own composion. This would allow people who are strangers to each others but are likeminded to work on a piece of music together. This could apply also to anyother kind of art project. Like for example a painter creates a picture. A music video maker finds a bunch of interisting paintings from different artists and uses them in his own production. This would of course also need that all the material published in this certain “groupware for creation” would be without copyright and free for everyone to use or expand. Though also I would as an important feature also that the artists would communicate each others that the goal would set together and everyone would know participating in something, rather than little pieces traveling towards a neverending destination where only the next stop is clear for the person currently working on the piece.

This at least could lead to a birth of a new world culture. But could it lead to something else as well? Would the true point and human aspects change radically in this kind of projects compared to old methods of collaborative creativity and could this effect on the artists motivation for creativity?

Ideas were inspired by:
The course book website : http://www.hcibook.com/e3/plain/chaps/ch10
And an article by Jonathan Grudin : Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers [acm: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=175230]