Thu, 8 Dec 1994 17:03:11 -0800 for Date: Thu, 8 Dec 94 20:02 EST From: "Doug Smith: Computer Czar--LuvDoug" To: socgrad@UCSD.EDU It's nice to see people interested in the community concept. Some of the responses to our first post on "Communities in Cyberspace" argued that community can exist anywhere. That community is an abstraction whose definition can by agreement be changed (just like boundaries), and that if we continued to agree that community has a local component that we somehow DENY interactional norms (non sequitur, mon ami?). Still others suggested that since they were not informally interacting with their neighbors (who were interacting with each other) that community did not exist. Lastly, we were asked, "well, if we're not a community, what the hell are we?" Traditionally, there have been three definitions of community. The first states that local territory is a necessary element of community. For example, Thomas Bender (1978) states "The most common sociological definitions used today tend to focus on a community as an aggregate of people who share a common interest in a particular locality." It is local social interaction that delineates the culture and structure of a community. The second focuses on the organization of social institutions and associations in the social life of a local pop. Under this definition, community is usually taken to be the smallest complete form of "society". MacIver and Page (1949) "The mark of community is that one's life may be lived wholly within it". As you can see so far, "Cyberspace" is 0 for 2 on the old community scoreboard. Now we come to the third definition which utilizes Lewin's field theory. Under this definition, community is an "interactional field", an arena within which different degrees of interaction take place among individuals and organizations (Wilkinson, almost any piece since 1972). Local interaction, towards its place, its structure and its culture strengthens the community. Does "Cyberspace" fall under this third definition? No, because being on the net does not allow for the creation of a community field. A community field arises when people live together and interact on matters CONCERNING THEIR COMMON INTEREST IN THE LOCALITY. (I would stress here that interaction is not just discourse, but action.) Community interaction is special in that it is much more likely to produce what Schmalenbach refers to as "Bund" (loosely translated as communion). It's not impossible for other interactional fields to produce communion; however, it is much more difficult for them to do so. Now back to the questions at hand. 1) Boundaries change by agreement, why don't communities? Community fields do change; they are not static. They arise and fall all the time; however, they are infinitely more likely to arise in localities. 2) I interacted much more with a loose network of people around the city than my neighbors, doesn't this mean that communities aren't local? No, we would argue that you were in an interactional field (or what Tomatsu Shibutani or Anselm Strauss would call a social world), but not a community field. While you might be more involved in such a field it would not encompass many issues that affected your everyday life. For example, what school you attended or whether there was a crime watch program, or whether a waste incinerator would be cited in your backyard are place related issues, that would require interaction with your neighbors. These issues provide avenues for a community field to be born but do not guarantee a community field will be created. In fact if you were more involved with people across town, I would suspect that a community field would not arise. (Another good example of this is Kroll-Smith and Couch's work on the Centralia, PA mine fire. They point out that the creation of a community field to confront the government about the fire was inhibited by historic ethnic differences.) 3) Doesn't keeping locality deny norms of interaction? No. Communities are not the only interactional fields (or social worlds, if you prefer). We're not saying that interaction doesn't occur on the net; we're just saying that this form of interaction isn't a community. We do not see how this is in any way stifling interactional norms. 4) Finally, if we have a feeling of belonging don't we belong? Yes, you belong to a network and can develop sentiments toward other net members and the net itself, but the net is not tied to place. Therefore it's not a community. Lastly, we never said that interaction on the internet should not be studied. Doug and Frank