[Air-l] conceptual lexicon

[DENISECARTER at denisecarter.net]

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 at usa.net>:

> 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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