Jonathon Sterne asks:
Why should we be so concerned with characterizing online activity in terms of community? This has boggled my mind for some time.
Though probably not an answer that will satisfy you, here's mine: From the get-go "community" has been a term that many 'ordinary' users have used to describe at least a subset of their online experience (including me before i ever thought of using the term in scholarship). That in and of itself makes it worthy of investigation. It's not a term imposed by academicians, it's one we co-opted from popular discourse. It's certainly worth asking critically why online activity is so often characterized in terms of community, but the question needs to be broadened beyond scholars. [as a total aside, i'm reminded of the creationist student in my nonverbal class who argued that the reason primates have some facial expressions similar to humans is that they learned them from hanging out with Darwin -- the reason people describe their online groups as communities is that they learned to use the term from scholarship about them?] Invoking the term "community" with all of its attendant baggage and nuance is a way that many internet users have made and continue to make sense of this technology. From an academic perspective, far more than the alternative concepts Jonathan poses (particularly friendship, association, kindness, good will, consideration, mutuality), "community" and the history of scholarship examining this concept, allows us to explore underlying logics that make all of these concepts *fit together into a system* that enables people to know how to act and to perpetuate those systems. (See practice theorists like Bourdieu, Lave & Wenger...). I talk about all of those notions in my work, and the term community works quite nicely as an overarching concept to examine how these values, relationships, and ways of treating people fit together. And more importantly, community is an overarching concept not because it's a nice scholarly trope, but because when real people are in online contexts their understandings of others' actions and decisions about how to act themselves are shaped in part through this concept. It's an abstraction with force. This side-steps the questions of whether community is good or bad and what cultural forces lead late 20th/early 21st century westerners to fret so much about community, questions which deserve critical inquiry. But until I hear lots of users talking about their online experience in terms of 'good will' or 'mutuality', I'll argue that 'community' is a more meaningful concept with which to start. David Silver asks whether the dotcom rise and fall has tweaked perspectives of people who've been researching online community for some time. Personally, I have a big 'ha ha I coulda told you that' reaction (along with a 'wish i'd divested some stocks two years ago' reaction :) ), because the main thing that people really really like about the internet is the intangible and literally priceless ability to connect with other people, and most dotcom companies could not have cared less about interpersonal elements of the internet. remember WAY back when in the early 1990s when Prodigy had to revamp its whole price structure because it had never occurred to them that people would use their service for INTERACTION rather than buying! Which gets us right back to the company vs. community subject line ... Thanks everyone for such a stimulating discussion! We should have more of these! Nancy Nancy _________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym nbaym@ku.edu http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org