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)