[Air-l] Community and our Conceptual Lexicon

[Ian Goodwin]

Hi All,
 
In regard to the recent series of interesting posts about the
usefulness (or otherwise) of community in thinking through/analysing
virtual social relations, I'd like emphasise that I think it would be a
large mistake to discount community altogether as a theoretically
unproductive term.
 
Community is undoubtedly one of the most 'slipperly' of terms - it
certainly retains an inherent definitional ambiguity. This makes it an
infuriatingly difficult term difficult term to employ productively in
social research.  This is partly because community has always been tied
to normative prescription as well as empirical description. Yet the most
important point about community is that it pervades everyday life. I'd
go so far as to say it seems to be indispensable to social discourse.
Thus, as Peter  Hamilton put it in his perceptive introduction to
Cohen's (1985) classic study (The Symbolic Construction of Community),
community would have long ago been "discounted as grist to the scholarly
mill were it not for the remarkable hold that the idea of community
exerts over both the intellectual and popular mind" (p.7).
 
It is for this reason we should be careful about discounting community.
People manifestly believe in community and use the term in their
everyday discourse. In this sense community motivates, sustains, and
structures social action. If we are to fully understand the development
of online sociability, therefore, in many instances (where the term is
employed 'in the field' by users themselves), we need to understand,
following an interpretive epistemology, how users of the technology
understand the term. This will undoubtedly be context specific, but it
is also central to how the technology becomes actively used. In this
respect the positive normative overtones of community often come into
play. For example fears of 'community decline', whilst difficult if not
impossible to verify from an objective perspective, often motivate
residents of localities to become involved in online initiatives (and
structure how they then interact online - the topics they deem
'relevant', the goals of the online group etc) - this was certainly the
case in the community informatics initiatives I studied in Birmingham
(UK). 
 
Best,
 
Ian Goodwin
 
Senior Lecturer
MA Communication Studies/ Graduate Diploma in Digital Media
School of Communication Studies
Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies
Auckland University of Technology
Private Bag 92006
Auckland 1020
Aotearoa/ New Zealand
 
Telephone 64-9-917 9999 x 7734
Email ian.goodwin at aut.ac.nz