[Air-L] Interrelations of "Virtual Communities" and "SocialNetworks"

Christian Fuchs christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
Fri Sep 14 07:16:53 PDT 2007


Jose Abdelnour-Nocera schrieb:
> Hello:
>
> I think that this comparison is similar to that of VCs and 'Networked
> Communities', a term that has been there long before 'social networks'.
>
> My perception of this is that we should not confuse tehcnological
> platforms with the social affordances of technology. Because of this,
> 'old' technology used to support VCs will continue to exist insofar as
> it helps fulfill the expressive and normative objectives of those
> communities.
>
> José   
>
>
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>   
for me there are different forms of social activity on the net: on the 
one hand more cognitive forms, which is more a durkheimian idea of the 
social as all-present social structures. communicative forms that can be 
explained by weber's and habermas' notion of the social. communication 
can result in emotional ties, but must not necessarily. if it does, then 
i think the notion of the social as community (as in the sense of 
tönnies' concept of community or marx's concept of co-operation) is 
present. i would argue for conceiving the internet as evolutionary model 
of different forms of the social, the social evolves on the net, it 
takes on different forms and there is no automatism for the transition 
from one level to another.
what troubles me is that people talk about e.g. "social software" 
without developing concise theoretical notions of what exactly sociality 
means in this term and how it can be grounded in the tradition of social 
theory.
the notion of network can in my opinion either refer to building links, 
i.e. to the communication network. then not each online communication 
forms a social network that exists at least temporaly, but not each 
social network is a community, but has a potential to transform into a 
community...

christian

-- 
_____________________________
Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs
Assistant Professor for Internet and Society
ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research 
in Information and Communication Technologies & Society
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University of Salzburg
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Austria
christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
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Information-Society-Technology:
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