In social theory, I think with investigation... you'll find that there are more authors that use 'community' than dismiss 'community' as a concept. Community, like many concepts with political and policy implications, is essentially contested (connelly), and in that it is hard to define and/or operationalize unless one is thoroughly embedded in a specific theoretical tradition that disregards other definitions. Network... looks like it lets you escape the issues with 'community', but you always have to wonder then what you are really talking about when you are talking about a network of people. You hopefully have defined some way that the people are connected, thus the network, and then the question always becomes... is the way that people are connected 'real' or an artifact of the research. frequently, I find that when people say there is a network, I could disagree by saying the way that you operationalize the network is insufficiently rich and lacks the capacity to really indicate connection and all you really have mapped is 'x person has talked to y person' or 'x person reports that they share interest z with y person'. In the end, the theory has to map onto the empirical evidence, and not extend it. While I appreciate your addition of additional theoretical terms from 'social theory', i tend to think that they are actually more methodological terms, and specific ones from a tradition that has its followers on the list. here's a thought if you want to really deal with social theory, throw out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually analyzing the collective. once that is done, then the social will be analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real. perhaps then you would also be able to sufficiently distinguish a local community from its contexts? On Jul 28, 2006, at 4:14 AM, John Postill wrote:
One key area that we haven’t yet discussed, in this interesting exchange on terminology, is social theory. In addition to having to keep up with technologies that have a tendency to become obsolete very quickly, we Internet researchers also need to keep abreast of developments in social theory – where things move, for better or worse, more slowly, but they still move.
Over the past couple of years, in writing up my ethnography on Internet activism and local governance in a Kuala Lumpur suburb, I have found that the conceptual landscape on what we might call ‘Internet localisation’ (how local authorities and residents appropriate Internet technologies to pursue their own goals) is dominated by two good old sociological notions: community and network (a third influential notion is public sphere, esp. in connection to 'e-democracy' projects).
That community as a theoretical concept has long been obsolete is well established (see MacFarlane 1977, Amit and Rapport 2002), and yet we still find it literally all over the place, in phrases such as ‘local community’, ‘community networks’, ‘community informatics’, ‘online community’, etc.
Network has far more potential as a sociological term, as demonstrated by Barry Wellman and his colleagues, but in my view it still takes up far too much room in our conceptual universes. With Amit, who writes in a different context, I think we in Internet studies need to broaden our sociation lexicons beyond our current over-reliance on community and network, e.g. with concepts such as field, action-set, age-set, arena, sodality, committee, fellowship, etc (Postill forthcoming).
I was wondering if others on the list had any thoughts on this? (BTW there’s a media studies conference on social theory coming up at Oxford University this 6-8 September), see
http://www.cresc.man.ac.uk/events/sept06/Venue&Travel.htm
Best wishes
John Postill Sheffield Hallam University, UK
References
Amit, V. and N. Rapport (2002) The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity. London: Pluto.
MacFarlane, A. (1977) Reconstructing Historical Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freely available online at: http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/reconstructing/contents.htm
Postill, J. (forthcoming) Localising the internet: beyond communities and networks, submitted to New Media and Society (awaiting readers’ comments)
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