_____ From: Dr. Steve Eskow [mailto:drseskow@cox.net] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 9:41 AM To: 'Sam Tilden'; 'air-l@listserv.aoir.org' Subject: RE: [Air-l] Reification was Definitions Sam, None of us here has the ability or the power to make the term "community" "robust," if by "robust" you mean getting agreement on a single and bounded definition. One scholar found 90 different definitions and usages of the term. Is Paris a "community"? One definition says yes, another says no. Benedict Anderson wrote of the role of newspapers and other media in generating the sense of nationhood: he called his book on the subject IMAGINED COMMUNITIES. In Anderson's view the United States, then, is an "imagined community." I believe it was Howard Rheingold who first coined, or popularized, the term "virtual community." What the term has done, among other things, is call attention to the fact that the Internet is unlike earlier "mass" media that were essentially monologic, broadcasting one to many: the Internet, he showed, was dialogic, allowing for the conversations and the commonalities that characterized (he argued) "community." Before the Internet communities had to involve proximity in space and time: now we could have community without proximity: thus, "virtual communities." The term was widely adopted because it was useful. For many of us, it continues to be useful in pointing to a characteristic of the Internet that makes it different from the broadcast media, and from proximate communities, face-to-face communities. What keeps a locution alive is usefulness, not logic or precision or "robustness." When it ceases to be useful it disappears. Steve Eskow All-new <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=43256/*http:/advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbe ta> Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.