[Air-l] Re: Company vs. Community

[Christian Nelson]

"D. Silver" wrote:

> It's also nice to know that folks are thinking about these issues, and I
> would be interested to hear about any published work on these matters. I
> agree - I think - with Bram when he says "The assumption that communities
> and commerce exist in an agonistic relationship is problematic.  They don't,
> necessarily."

I think that personal/communal and commercial relationships do exist in an
agonistic relationship for us *when we are aware that these two are being
mixed*. Think of the hard feelings of some when they learned that they'd been
made the target of an MCI telemarketer as part of  MCI's friends-and-family
campaign. True, that campaign was a success, but I'd argue that this is
because a fair number of people to forget that this campaign was about making
money and thought of it more as the simple (and even benevolent) facilitation
of an opportunity to increase their personal/communal relationships with a
communal group of friends and family. This in-line with a bit of research I've
seen that indicates at least some folks generally see advertisements as
benevolent informational messages.
--Christian Nelson