Jose Abdelnour-Nocera schrieb:
Hello:
I think that this comparison is similar to that of VCs and 'Networked Communities', a term that has been there long before 'social networks'.
My perception of this is that we should not confuse tehcnological platforms with the social affordances of technology. Because of this, 'old' technology used to support VCs will continue to exist insofar as it helps fulfill the expressive and normative objectives of those communities.
José
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for me there are different forms of social activity on the net: on the one hand more cognitive forms, which is more a durkheimian idea of the social as all-present social structures. communicative forms that can be explained by weber's and habermas' notion of the social. communication can result in emotional ties, but must not necessarily. if it does, then i think the notion of the social as community (as in the sense of tönnies' concept of community or marx's concept of co-operation) is present. i would argue for conceiving the internet as evolutionary model of different forms of the social, the social evolves on the net, it takes on different forms and there is no automatism for the transition from one level to another. what troubles me is that people talk about e.g. "social software" without developing concise theoretical notions of what exactly sociality means in this term and how it can be grounded in the tradition of social theory. the notion of network can in my opinion either refer to building links, i.e. to the communication network. then not each online communication forms a social network that exists at least temporaly, but not each social network is a community, but has a potential to transform into a community... christian -- _____________________________ Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet and Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Fax +43 662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access online journal for the foundations of information science: http://triplec.uti.at