Saturday, June 30, 2007
Can There Be A Sense of Community In A Virtual Context?
Barry Wellman defined communities as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity. Information and communication technologies have created powerful new expressions of community that go far beyond all hitherto forms of community. Technologically mediated communities - cyber community or virtual community - are bringing about new kinds of social groups, which are polymorphous, highly personalized and often expressive.
Three social forms of technology are identified in the essay 'Virtual Community' by Gerard Delanty: the tool model, the uotopian model and the cultural model. In the tool model, technology is a means to achieve a humanly defined end. Technology was an instrument in the service of human need or purpose. Modernity added to this a second form of technology; technology as an end in itself. With the advancement of modernity, technologies become more and more utopian in its aspiration. The cultural model technology talks about technology being interwoven into the fabric of everyday life and have the capacity to change human nature itself. Technology has embedded and intermeshed with everyday life that it becomes 'socialized', eliminating the distance which all previous communication technologies required.
Secondly, the Internet brings together people worldwide in a sociality and is regarded as a global market which facilitates the exchange of information. The Internet has enhanced the mobility and also the velocities that people experience in everyday life. Sociologically, there is no reason why these forms of reality are less real than other kinds. Virtual interactivity is generating new kinds of 'dwellings' and can produce communion without propinquity because people can imagine themselves as belonging to a virtual community.
Rheingold's view of the Internet defines it as an alternative reality to existing realities and as having the capacity to transform society. His assumption was information and communication technologies are themselves capabale of not only changing social relations but creating new ones. He argued that virtual communities are 'communities' on the Net, suggesting that virtual communities are technological versions of traditional communities. Rheingold also thinks that the Internet can offer new spaces in which community can be reconstituted in meaningful forms with people with common identities.
Castells maintains virtual community is becoming a new kind of reality that has the capacity to transform social relations. He advances a clear thesis that the Internet has a positive effect on social interaction. He argues networks are being built by choices and strategies of social actors, be it individual, families or social groups. Thus, the major transformation of sociability in complex societies took place with the substitution of networks for spatial communities as major forms of sociability. Most on-line communities are 'ephemeral coomunities', which should be understood as 'networks of sociability'.
Calhoun wrote community life can be understood as the life people live in dense, multiplex, relatively autonomous networks of social relationship. Computer-mediated communication adds to existing forms of communication. Virtual communities exist as communities based on shared identities and whose members may rarely meet. It does not necessarily create new social and poliical realities; they strengthen already existing ones, especially in offering a means of linking people with similar taste. His argument that community must be theorized in terms of social relationships of belonging is important in grounding the concept of virtual community. The claim that virtual community is a supplement to existing forms of community has been supported by sociological research: "Online communities" come in very different shapes and sizes, ranging from virtual communities that connect geographically distant people with no prior acquaintance who share similar intersts, to settings that facilitate interactions that focus on issues relevant to a geographically defined neighbourhood'.
In his article 'Networks, Swarms, Multitudes', Eugene Thacker says networks are spatial and the universal properties it displays are not so much evident in the dynamic functioning of the network, as they are static patterns which exist above the temporality of the network. He argues that in a network, affect is disengaged from emotion. Affects can be increased or diminished, aided or restrained. Affects is networked, becomes distributed and is detached from its anthropomorphic locus in the individual.
The computer network brackets the physical presence of the users, by either omitting or simulating corporeal immediacy. The stand-in self can never fully represent us. Today computer's communication cuts the physical face out of the communication process. Without directly meeting others physically, our ethics languishes. Computers eliminate the need to respond directly to what takes place between humans. Electronic life converts primary bodily presence into telepresence, introducing a remove between represented presences, therefore making on-line existence intrinsically ambiguous.
Belonging has been reshaped radically, leading many to question the very possibility of belonging as it disappears into the flow of communication. The result is that place, locality and symbolic ties are being drained of any content, and in their place are more fluid and temporary forms of social relations sustained only by process of communication outside of which they have no reality. As the online culture grows geographically, the sense of community diminishes.
The existence of forums and discussion groups is evidence there is community in the virtual context. It gathers people without the physical limitations of geography, time zones or conspicuous social status. Modernity is constantly displacing the individual, place the familiar everyday world and re-embedding these in different contexts. Our sense of community is pervaded by the realization that the global and local are connected. The information age has brought about a saturation of communication, and with it proximity becomes ever more present in people's lives.
This paper concludes that virtual communities are communication communities - they have made belonging more communicative. People are connecting in globalized social networks rather than exclusively in local communal groups and using new technologies. Computer-mediated communication does not take place in a social vacuum but in social networks. Information and communication technologies empower community networks where these already exist but do not, for most part, create new kinds of community.
I know I bored you people. But I'm worried. How to memorise all this essay? Sigh.
Nvm, I shall reward you all with this!