Hi Folks, I've only read enough Luhmann to have the opinion that he's interesting, and I'm not an online ethnographer, so let me just offer a general comment linking the two discussions: It seems to me that "community" is exactly the same kind of abstraction as "society" -- a kind of abstraction Christian is querying. Now, I'm all for abstractions in scholarship, and I think abstractions are real and exert real effects in human activity. So I'm not bothered by talking about society or community as a thing (perhaps Christian and I will argue about this, but that's for another time). But we're also circling around the old "is"/"ought" distinction (almost wrote is/ouch, which would be a *different* distinction) that has plagued philsophy and social theory for a long time. Why should we be so concerned with characterizing online activity in terms of community? This has boggled my mind for some time. I know there's a long intellectual history, starting with the Chicago School and the pragmatists, of looking for community or indexing its loss. You see the same thing with social theorists writing about mass society and the suburbs in the 1950s. You see it with television scholars in the 1970s and 1980s (and hell, how about all those subculture studies?) And again, you see it with academics writing about the internet today. Of course, people online also talk about their activities in terms of "community" so there may be an empirical basis for choosing that term, but I also think there's an underside to the community discourse that's rarely commented upon -- and I'd be interested to hear impressions from people outside the US, where the class politics may be different. In my opinion, academics and other members of the professional-managerial class in the US have an afflication whereby they find their own lives lacking in some abstract quality named community. They then go out and find it everywhere *else* in the society. There are two problems with this behavior: 1. Though I'm sure it has its relatively unique modes of sociability, I don't think PMC life carries any more or less of that elusive "community" quality than other forms of life in the US. 2. Community isn't automatically a good thing, and I find its normative value highly questionable, even if we're talking "good" communities, whatever those might be. Now, this isn't meant as an individualist rant (though I suppose insofar as I believe people ought to be able to live lives not determined by their circumstances of birth, that might be somewhat individualistic), but rather a query as to why on Earth we'd want to elevate "community" as our preferred model of social association? Why not, for instance, friendship (or friendship networks), association, kindness, organization, some metaphor of urbanity, good will, consideration, mutuality, etc.? None of those terms are without their problems, but none of them have been written about with the same veracity as "community." In short, I don't pose a simple solution, so don't hold me to one, but I've yet to read an argument for why scholars ought to use the term community to describe online interaction -- why we should want "community" as our index of online sociability. I've just seen lots of arguments about how online interactions either fit, don't fit, or transform some conception of community (all of which presume we ought to be out there looking for community) -- all of which assume a prior "should" that I haven't seen. What am I missing? Besides, it's a lot harder to characterize ebay -- or the people who run it -- as your friends than it is to characterize them as a community. Best, --Jonathan, enjoying break
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
participants (2)
-
Jonathan Sterne -
Nancy Baym