[Air-l] Reification was Definitions

[Dr. Steve Eskow]

  _____  

From: Dr. Steve Eskow [mailto:drseskow at cox.net] 
Sent: Friday, October 20, 2006 9:41 AM
To: 'Sam Tilden'; 'air-l at listserv.aoir.org'
Subject: RE: [Air-l] Reification was Definitions

 

Sam,

 

None of us here has the ability or the power to make the term "community"
"robust," if by "robust" you mean getting agreement on a single and bounded
definition. One scholar found 90 different definitions and usages of the
term. Is Paris a "community"?  One definition says yes, another says no.
Benedict Anderson wrote of the role of newspapers and other media in
generating the sense of nationhood: he called his book on the subject
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES. In Anderson's view the United States, then, is an
"imagined community."

 

I believe it was Howard Rheingold who first coined, or popularized, the term
"virtual community."  What the term has done, among other things, is call
attention to the fact that the Internet is unlike earlier "mass" media that
were essentially monologic, broadcasting one to many: the Internet, he
showed, was dialogic, allowing for the conversations and the commonalities
that characterized (he argued) "community." Before the Internet communities
had to involve proximity in space and time: now we could have community
without proximity: thus, "virtual communities."

 

The term was widely adopted because it was useful. For many of us, it
continues to be useful in pointing to a characteristic of the Internet that
makes it different from the broadcast media, and from proximate communities,
face-to-face communities. 

 

What keeps a locution alive is usefulness, not logic or precision or
"robustness." When it ceases to be useful it disappears.

 

Steve Eskow

 

 

All-new
<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=43256/*http:/advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbe
ta>  Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.