This is just a stub at the moment -- just want to park a couple thoughts till I have time to get to them and do them the verbal justice they deserve.
First, the worldwide market on instant messaging, discussed here in an excellent 2002 report TelcoRevolutions . What's really extraordinary is that with an installed base of hundreds of millions, the whole thing is worth under $200 million, and the bulk of that is accounted for by products that don't necessarily fit into the category -- things like Groove Networks and Lotus' messaging product. The reason I'm interested in it at the moment is that I'm wpending time thinking about avatar chat -- looking at companies like IMVU and wondering about the appeal (or lack thereof) of adding a face to the bare-bones experience of IM.
Next, MUSH'es. Thomas Mallaby and I were talking the other day and the term came up -- neither of us could recall (in my case, because I never new in the first place) what the S and H stand for. "Shared Hallucinations" it turns out Wikipedia entry on MUSH'es -- I sort of feel that describes so many things that are interesting, friendship, camerdarie, shared suffering, love and even life itself. Certainly it's obvious that the MU's of the world have shifted to the MMO's and the bulk of today's games are the tightly scripted descendants of MUDS, while the more open-ended are ones like Second Life -- the inheritors of the MUSH'es. In fact, you could even apply the model to Alternate Reality Games and Immersive Reality Games. In the former, a central core of "puppetmasters' pull the strings and unfold and predetermined narrative mystery while in the latter, the players contribute to the story's outcome.
Finally, having discovered the reference to Julian Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"Wikipedia in the notes preceding Snowcrash, I've decided it's time to read it, once and for all. Allen Kay told Andrew Pascal and I fantastic story at the Bellagio about the book and how his life was saved once when a hostile customs agent found it in his luggage and was so moved by their shared intellectual bond that he released him. A testament to powerful, moving ideas -- will report on it once I'm done.