[Air-l] conceptual lexicon

[Denise M Carter]

 John Postill said in a discussion of the term community: 

"that this term is too imprecise to be of much use to social theorists
trying
to identify and understand social formations."

My own research was an ethnography of a virtual community - much of it
concerned with understanding the perceptions/meanings/beliefs etc behind
peoples everyday understanding of what virtual community was. While I see
John's point about finding another term that may be more precise to identify
and understand a particular social formation I was always brought back to
the notion of community by the people who lived in this particular VC. I was
therefore forced to identify and understand virtual community in terms of
'community' rather than any other notion. 

My position is not that I believe 'community' to be the most useful term to
use, rather that I have to use whatever term my respondents use and then
seek to understand why - because that is what drives their understanding.

In this way I come back to my original thoughts on the subject - that our
understanding of community is constantly changing (as ever), that it remains
a 'slippery concept' and finally that it doesn't really matter what social
theorists think of the term if that is the one out there and in use by
everyday people in any particular place.

I also would be a little worried if there was a precise term to use for any
kind of social formation!

Denise


Dr Denise Maia Carter,
Research Fellow,
Cyberspace Research Unit
University of Central Lancashire
Maudland Building
Preston, PR1  2HE