surely community is not obsolete - but merely changing - it remains, as ever, 'a slippery concept' - as I have written in previous articles: "So what is community? Amit and Rapport (2002) sum it up by explaining that the term community is one of the most difficult and ambiguous terms in the social sciences. Implying that community only continues to exist in general usage because it evokes a thick assortment of meanings, presumptions and images (Amit and Rapport, 2002: 13), they conceptualise it as possessing an emotional resonance rather than a utilitarian one. Considering it a slippery notion (Amit and Rapport, 2002: 14), they suggest on the one hand that the notion of community is too vague and too variable to be of much use as an analytical tool, and on the other that the appeal of community is dependant on tensions between what they call experiences of sociality and platitudes of collective belonging (Amit and Rapport, 2002: 14)" Dr Denise Maia Carter, Research Fellow, Cyberspace Research Unit University of Central Lancashire Maudland Building Preston, PR1 2HE Quoting John Postill <jpostill@usa.net>:
One key area that we havenât 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 â 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 âInternet localisationâ (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 âlocal communityâ, âcommunity networksâ, âcommunity informaticsâ, âonline communityâ, 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 thereâs 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 readersâ comments)
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