conceptual lexicon
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)
In social theory, I think with investigation... you'll find that there are more authors that use 'community' than dismiss 'community' as a concept. Community, like many concepts with political and policy implications, is essentially contested (connelly), and in that it is hard to define and/or operationalize unless one is thoroughly embedded in a specific theoretical tradition that disregards other definitions. Network... looks like it lets you escape the issues with 'community', but you always have to wonder then what you are really talking about when you are talking about a network of people. You hopefully have defined some way that the people are connected, thus the network, and then the question always becomes... is the way that people are connected 'real' or an artifact of the research. frequently, I find that when people say there is a network, I could disagree by saying the way that you operationalize the network is insufficiently rich and lacks the capacity to really indicate connection and all you really have mapped is 'x person has talked to y person' or 'x person reports that they share interest z with y person'. In the end, the theory has to map onto the empirical evidence, and not extend it. While I appreciate your addition of additional theoretical terms from 'social theory', i tend to think that they are actually more methodological terms, and specific ones from a tradition that has its followers on the list. here's a thought if you want to really deal with social theory, throw out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually analyzing the collective. once that is done, then the social will be analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real. perhaps then you would also be able to sufficiently distinguish a local community from its contexts? On Jul 28, 2006, at 4:14 AM, John Postill wrote:
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)
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jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
I agree with chunks of what Jeremy wrote. But...
definitions. Network... looks like it lets you escape the issues with 'community', but you always have to wonder then what you are really talking about when you are talking about a network of people. You hopefully have defined some way that the people are connected, thus the network, and then the question always becomes... is the way that people are connected 'real' or an artifact of the research. frequently, I find that when people say there is a network, I could disagree by saying the way that you operationalize the network is insufficiently rich and lacks the capacity to really indicate connection and all you really have mapped is 'x person has talked to y person' or 'x person reports that they share interest z with y person'. In the end, the theory has to map onto the empirical evidence, and not extend it.
I agree with the last sentence, and everything before it, but not the implied connection. Operationalizing, observing, and measuring networks with paths such as 'x talks to y' is perfectly sufficient if the exogenous variable is a network of talk. The problem, as with "community", is extrapolating from 'x talks to y' that the network involves more than (or only) that, rather than extending only from that empirical evidence. Somewhat related, networks (and communities) are too often and too hastily toggled between the independent and dependent variation. Research on the *consequences* of tight talk networks may say little or nothing about the creation of or conditions for those networks. Lay talk, of course, makes such jumps grossly and inanely. But scholarly work, too, could be more articulate in delineating the empirical extent (and theoretical role) of networks.
here's a thought if you want to really deal with social theory, throw out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually analyzing the collective. once that is done, then the social will be analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real.
Again, I agree with these two sentences, but not the implication. We should indeed focus on the "real", and move beyond invididualism. But that doesn't mean that "analyzing the collective" requires aggregate measures. Descriptions and observations should proceed from case instances. We can thus analyze a collective (whatever it's called - network, community, nation, Frank, etc.) as the multitude of observed interactions (is the network of talk dense or sparse, tight or loose?) without extrapolating that the collective is something more or other than those observed interactions. Analyzing a collective, devoid of descriptions of case instances, is less profound (and much farther from "real") than individualism. -eg
here's a thought if you want to really deal with social theory, throw out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually analyzing the collective. once that is done, then the social will be analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real.
Again, I agree with these two sentences, but not the implication. We should indeed focus on the "real", and move beyond invididualism. But that doesn't mean that "analyzing the collective" requires aggregate measures. Descriptions and observations should proceed from case instances. We can thus analyze a collective (whatever it's called - network, community, nation, Frank, etc.) as the multitude of observed interactions (is the network of talk dense or sparse, tight or loose?) without extrapolating that the collective is something more or other than those observed interactions. Analyzing a collective, devoid of descriptions of case instances, is less profound (and much farther from "real") than individualism.
It is actually unclear that we can extrapolate a collective identity from a multitude of identities, though that is what many believe.... It is just one theoretical tradition that accepts that aggregation or the whole is equal to the some of the parts, others believe that the whole is less than and/or greater than the some of the parts. It is unclear to me whether it can be more profound than individualism, what does seem to be the case is that people have real problems with both Genetic and Atomistic Fallacies between the individual and the collective. Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series
At 06:55 AM 29/07/2006, eg wrote:
Again, I agree with these two sentences, but not the implication. We should indeed focus on the "real", and move beyond invididualism. But that doesn't mean that "analyzing the collective" requires aggregate measures. Descriptions and observations should proceed from case instances. We can thus analyze a collective (whatever it's called - network, community, nation, Frank, etc.) as the multitude of observed interactions (is the network of talk dense or sparse, tight or loose?) without extrapolating that the collective is something more or other than those observed interactions. Analyzing a collective, devoid of descriptions of case instances, is less profound (and much farther from "real") than individualism.
If the collection refers to 'completed experiences', one can analyse this kind of collection in an infinite number of ways. If we are referring to the realm of the possible, one can also use a collection of completed experiences as a starting point for an infinite number of speculations, each relying on knowledge of completed experiences, and each more profound than individual descriptions of single cases. Is the question whether the merely possible is real? We could take that as a hypothesis and see how it works out. D.
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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John Postill said in a discussion of the term community: "that this term is too imprecise to be of much use to social theorists trying to identify and understand social formations." My own research was an ethnography of a virtual community - much of it concerned with understanding the perceptions/meanings/beliefs etc behind peoples everyday understanding of what virtual community was. While I see John's point about finding another term that may be more precise to identify and understand a particular social formation I was always brought back to the notion of community by the people who lived in this particular VC. I was therefore forced to identify and understand virtual community in terms of 'community' rather than any other notion. My position is not that I believe 'community' to be the most useful term to use, rather that I have to use whatever term my respondents use and then seek to understand why - because that is what drives their understanding. In this way I come back to my original thoughts on the subject - that our understanding of community is constantly changing (as ever), that it remains a 'slippery concept' and finally that it doesn't really matter what social theorists think of the term if that is the one out there and in use by everyday people in any particular place. I also would be a little worried if there was a precise term to use for any kind of social formation! Denise Dr Denise Maia Carter, Research Fellow, Cyberspace Research Unit University of Central Lancashire Maudland Building Preston, PR1 2HE
participants (6)
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David Low -
Denise M Carter -
DENISECARTER＠denisecarter.net
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Ellis Godard -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
John Postill