[Air-l] conceptual lexicon

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

In social theory,   I think with investigation... you'll find that  
there are more authors that use 'community' than dismiss 'community'  
as a concept.  Community, like many concepts with political and  
policy implications, is essentially contested (connelly), and in that  
it is hard to define and/or operationalize unless one is thoroughly  
embedded in a specific theoretical tradition that disregards other  
definitions.   Network... looks like it lets you escape the issues  
with 'community', but you always have to wonder then what you are  
really talking about when you are talking about a network of  
people.   You hopefully have defined some way that the people are  
connected, thus the network, and then the question always becomes...  
is the way that people are connected 'real' or an artifact of the  
research.  frequently, I find that when people say there is a  
network, I could disagree by saying the way that you operationalize  
the network is insufficiently rich and lacks the capacity to really  
indicate connection and all you really have mapped is 'x person has  
talked to y person' or 'x person reports that they share interest z  
with y person'.   In the end, the theory has to map onto the  
empirical evidence, and not extend it.

While I appreciate your addition of additional theoretical terms from  
'social theory', i tend to think that they are actually more  
methodological terms, and specific ones from a tradition that has its  
followers on the list.

here's a thought if you want to really deal with social theory, throw  
out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually  
analyzing the collective.  once that is done, then the social will be  
analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real.   
perhaps then you would also be able to sufficiently distinguish a  
local community from its contexts?



On Jul 28, 2006, at 4:14 AM, John Postill wrote:

> 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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jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu
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