[Air-l] conceptual lexicon

[John Postill]

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)