[Air-l] conceptual lexicon

[John Postill]

Thank you to those of you who have responded to my email in which I suggest
(on the basis of a thorough literature review, I should add)
that the terms community and network are at present the paradigmatic sociation
notions in the study of Internet appropriations, and that it is high time that
we broaden our Internet sociation lexicon. 

It wasn't my intention to start a discussion on the relative merits or
demerits of the notions of community and network. This, I think, would only
reassert their centrality. What I think is more urgent for us as a field of
research and theorisation is to explore other Internet sociality concepts,
other analytical tools off the beaten community/network track, e.g. social
field, action-set, sodality, arena, etc, and see where they may take us.  Are
other Internet social scientists working outside the community/network
paradigm? If they are, what concepts are they using, and why? 

That said, and at the risk of undoing what I've just tied together, I can't
resist responding briefly to Denise Carter's posting on the notion of
community:

> surely community is not obsolete - but merely changing - it remains, as
ever, 'a
> slippery concept' [...] (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)"

This is precisely the trouble with community *as an analytical tool* when we
try to use it to understand social actualities, that it is 'too vague and too
variable'. On the other hand, community *as a folk term*, i.e. as a term used
by non-social scientists (including many politicians, cyberactivists and
self-taught researchers), it remains an important notion in that it does
indeed resonate with people's actual experiences and/or wishes of 'collective
belonging' -- at least in Anglophone countries, but not necessarily so in
other societies, eg in my experience, urban Spain or rural Sarawak (Malaysia).


So yes, by all means, let us integrate into our Internet analyses, where
appropriate, the uses people make of 'community' and similar terms in other
languages (if they are locally salient, that is), but always bearing in mind
that this term is too imprecise to be of much use to social theorists trying
to identify and understand social formations.  

John Postill
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
http://www.media-anthropology.net/