Chapter 8 - Miller Flashcards
people are tied together on a number of levels:
“Through kinship and blood relation.
Through mutual interdependence and multi-dimensional ties or associations where people have a number of different relationships with each other. So your next door neighbour might also be your butcher, friend and cousin, thus possessing family, business, social and locational ties.
Through historical ties to the place and the land
Urban life
allows people to specialise or compartmentalise their relationships by establishing them on the basis of one aspect or interest in life (work relationships, family relationships, leisure interests) as opposed to having relationships that intersect or are interdependent on many levels, as they would be in gemeinschaft relationships.
Giddens suggest that modern life is characterized by 3 aspects?
1) The separation of time and space.
2) The disembedding of social relationships and organisations.
3) The reflexive ordering of social relations.
Time has become effectively separated from space in terms of social action with others. We no longer have to ‘be’ together to act together.
The separation of space and time means that social institutions and relationships have become disembedded.
Ebay
“itself is an abstract system, in the sense that the company acts as an intermediary to ensure legal and fair commercial exchanges between complete strangers across long distances.”
Excerpt From: Miller, Vincent. “Understanding Digital Culture.” iBooks.
Reflexive ordering
“present in the awareness of the feedback system. Negative feedback may make one wary of bidding on goods sold by a certain seller, and choose another instead. Conversely, one is always concerned to maintain good feedback because one is reflexively aware of the importance of feedback status in future exchanges.
Detraditionalisation (Giddens)
a decline in the belief of a pre-given order of things, or a shift from ‘fate’ to ‘choice, ‘virtue’ to ‘preference’ and ‘embedded’ to ‘disembedded’ human relations
what happens as many aspects of social life become disembedded?
“people are exposed to a number of models for living outside the limitations of tradition, and individuals find it possible, to a certain extent, to choose from a number of options to construct their own biographies in a way that revolves less around the limits of tradition and fate and more around choice.
Thus, social relations, affiliation and identity become increasingly open to globalising influences.”
imagined communities
“encourages us to find communion with others beyond our locality through media and symbolic resources, and with people who we perhaps may never meet face-to-face.
four types of online communities ? (Armstrong and Hegal)
“Communities of transaction facilitate the exchange or buying and selling of goods and information.
Communities of interest bring together participants who wish to interact about specific topics of interest to them.
Communities of fantasy allow participants to create new environments, identities or imagined worlds.
Communities of relationship centre on intense personal experiences and create networks of support.
“Proponents of digital/electronic/internet/virtual communities argue ?
“that the proliferation of internet-based ‘communities’ are individually and socially beneficial on a number of levels.
first - nostalgic argument that internet-based communities can help to reverse or compensate for the lack of community in the ‘real world
Online community also provides the benefit of increased choice in one’s social relationships. The internet and other digital communication technologies liberate individuals from the social, geographical and biological constraints of place and proximity
community members can chose their level of involvement in the community itself.
- by overcoming space and distance, online communities also overcome the problem of mobility, in that belonging or membership to a community is not necessarily interrupted by the physical movement of people.
- virtual communities have a purpose in which membership provides perceived tangible benefits to their members. Rheingold, for example, suggests that virtual communities can be used to expand social and knowledge capital
- online communities do not have material limits. There are a potentially limitless number of online communities and these communities can have, in theory, a limitless number of members.
WELL
whole earth lectronic link
the gist of the argument against online community is that?
“instead of combating what observers see as the decline of communal relations by creating new forms of solidarity, online communication is actually furthering the process of individualisation. This is seen as damaging under the assumption that place – and the lack of choice imposed by the physical reality of place – itself plays an important part in creating the interdependence (and therefore sense of social responsibility and obligation) seen by many as important to the creation and sustenance of communities.
( Wellman and Gulia)
characterized the debate over online community as:
Manichean: a sort of ‘either/or’ scenario in which online sociality is seen as either the saviour of community, or the destroyer of it, with little room to recognise that the actual situation may be a combination of the two.
Presentist: in the sense that there was very little effort to see the ‘online’ as anything but ‘new’ and thus there was no attempt to place fears of community, or the potential of online relations, into any historical context.
Unscholarly: in that much of the work was speculative, anecdotal, and not grounded in either historical literature or empirical study.
Parochial: in that the internet was often portrayed as an isolated social phenomena. Thus, it was not really taken into account how much the boundary between online and offline life might be blurred, or how online interactions might fit in with aspects of offline life.
Wellman et al found that
“online interactions tended to supplement face-to-face contact without increasing or decreasing such contact. They also found that, in general, socially active people online tend to be socially active offline and, as a result, heavy internet users tend also to be more involved in offline volunteerism and politics.
