From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Virtual Community Discourse and the Dilemma of Modernity (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Sounding Board for the Self: Virtual Community as Ideology
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2005
Claims about the emergence of a new type of social aggregation-"virtual community"-cover a type of ideological discourse about social interactions. The main cultural resource fueling this ideology is the counterculture and its social project. Virtual community, both as a discursive and as a social practice, is a culmination rather than a resolution of the modern conflict between community and individuality. Presenting virtual community as a panacea for modern social tensions, especially that between individualistic and communitarian ideals, hides from sight not only some of the negative aspects of on-line social life (cliquish behavior and incivility) but also the role played by communication technology in fragmenting modern society.
IN OUR ERAS' POSTMODERN SOCIAL FORMS: "VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
The most rapid developments in human technology have taken place in the 20th century, and with these changes have come wide social transformations. Two of these transformations are quite paradoxical. On the one hand, great changes have occurred in the social fabric of traditional communities this century; changes that have served to divide and isolate people socially. Former agriculture population bases have shifted to urban and suburban settings. This increased concentration of settlement patterns, combined with large in-migration and population growth, has led to the disintegration of many traditional communities. People are increasingly isolated and cut off from one another, even as population densities grow. On the other hand electric, electronic and now computer based communications systems have brought people together in unprecedented ways. In our era, on one hand, the humankind faces to fragmentation, hyper-individualism and alienation are, on the other hand increasing of a interest on a new form of community naming postmodern -tribalism. (Bozkurt, 2003)
Cambridge Anthropology
The metaworld Ultima Online was designed to foster 'tight communities' of inhabitants. So ware users frequently say it has done just that. Yet many users spend most of their time online alone, engaged in practices of self-realization, individuation, and skill maximization. Drawing on Wilde's utopian writings, I suggest that Ultima Online has fostered an emergent sociality of sympathetic individualism - but that characterizing this as 'community', 'friendship' and 'camaraderie' also allows users to engage with seemingly opposed communitarian tropes of the good life. This affords insights into how ethical imaginations influence emergent forms of human sociality.
Communities at a Crossroads. Material semiotics for online sociability in the fade of cyberculture
2018
To what extent is talking of communal ties on the internet meaningful today?' At the turn of the 21st century this question resonates with many who had taken part in the early waves of TCP/IP-mediated grassroots cultures. 1 With the 2000's 'Dotcom burst', the War on Terror and its privacy intrusions, and the emergence of the 'Web 2.0' wave, spontaneous online aggregations find themselves at a crossroads. This book investigates the conditions under which, since the early 2000s, it has been possible to relaunch a discourse on online digital sociability, despite increasing trends in commercialization, securization, and territorialization. Far from being ill-timed, investigating online communities today is strategic. Indeed, after the Dotcom burst and the aftermath of 9/11, on one hand, and the explosive renaissance of digital participation with social networking applications, on the other, the culture of digital communitarians 2 seems to have either lost autonomy in favour of giant internet companies and governments or been popularized and absorbed into the 'Web 2.0' hype. 3 4 The experiences that marked the birth and development of digital communitarian cultures until the end of 1990s have been extensively mapped by historical, cultural, and media literature. From cold-war academic research with its cybernetic decentralized logics, to early civic networks pursuing the democratization of information technology; from counter-culture's communitarian legacy, to virtual life on the WELL; from 1970s' and 1980s' early Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), to Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities based on reputation capital; from net art's focus on the aesthetic of interaction and underground lists like Nettime, to the encounter of media artists with the global movement for social justice which saw the emergence of Indymedia: these diverse experiences have partly overlapped and contributed elements to the communitarian cultures which crystallized by mid 1990s. What came after the first internet bubble has received less systematic scholarly attention. This was partly due to diverse sectors and actors appropriating the landscape of digital sociability in the first decade of the 21st century, so that its boundaries became less clearly identifiable. 1 As mentioned in the Foreword, the research underpinning this book was conducted on a data set created in the period 2004-2007. Ethnographic observation and participation in digital media groups, mailing lists, and online networks started however much earlier, in 2001. With the exception of the Foreword-written for the 2018 Edition, throughout the book the present tense refers to the period 2007-2009. 2 With 'communitarian', 'communalism' and 'communitarianism' I do not refer to those political philosophies whose most influential exponents are Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, quoted by D. Bell, 'Communitarianism', in E. N. Zalta (ed.
Community as ideology and Utopia
Higher Education Quarterly, 1984
The word community does a job in the English language for which there appears to be a perennial perceived need. It refers to social ideals of belonging, togetherness, participation and camaraderie. Previously the phrase 'civil society' and before the eighteenth century simply 'society' fitted the bill. Each term briefly summed up a sense of immediacy and directness of personal relationship, in contrast with some organized establishment such as the 'state'.' This special kind of social relationship was felt to be lacking in the emerging industrial society of the nineteenth century. An acute sense of loss was felt: Disraeli bemoaned modern society's 'acknowledging no neighbour'. Pioneer social scientists attempted to analyse this apparent loss-of-community, frequently relying on popular definition and scntimcnt for direction. The classical, and frequently misunderstood, treatment of this theme is in the work o f Ferdinand Tonnies.2 'Tijnnies distinguished between two kinds of society in terms of the quality of relationships which characterise them. The social type declining in the nineteenth century was associated with gcmeinschuft (usually translated 'community'). Increasingly, social relations in industrial capitalist society were of the gesellschuft ('association') type. Pre-industrial social relationships were more iisuall). based on ascribed status, linked with territory and kinship. Church and family supplied the social glue which all made for enduring, emotionally satisfying, and thus, according t o Tbnnies, more meaningful social relationships. With industrialism and urbanism, however, Tonnies noted an increase o f scale, and o f impersonality. Relationships were increasingly hased on contract (especially the labour contract) and on calculation. For Tonnies, the shift to gesellschuft-type of
The Technological Expansion of Sociability: Virtual Communities as Imagined Communities
The reception of Benedict Anderson's ideas was very fruitful in many disciplines, and his work provided key concepts that can now throw a clarifying light in some blurry matters. The expression "imagined community" has known a remarkable proliferation, a situation that led to both the formation of a research direction and to the perpetuation of a cliché. In this respect, my article pointed out some suggestive characteristics of virtual communities, explaining why the imagined community is a valuable subject for the theorists of new media.
Virtual Sociability: From Community to Communitas
Extended Description To what degree can the human exchanges we observe online be called “sociability”? In other words, do these exchanges amount to any meaningful type of social organization? Are they more than the mere froth of collective emotion discharging its energy with a lot of noise but little consequence against the wave breakers of social media? Do the social interactions that take place in virtual space—all those kind or not-so-kind words sent back and forth—suggest the same level of commitment, dedication, morality, passion, or even depravity that we see in everyday life? Or, more succinctly, is sociability online less “social,” less “real” than what we see in everyday life? Tags internet, blogging, social networks, computer, virtual community, social theory, communication technology, online interaction, social groups, research