Fri, 9 Dec 1994 18:06:08 -0800 for <socgrad@ucsd.edu>
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 18:06:06 -0800 (PST)
From: Jiannbin Lee Shiao <pachinko@uclink.berkeley.edu>
Subject: communities: locality, localities, or interests
To: Sociology Graduate Student List <socgrad@UCSD.EDU>
On Thu, 8 Dec 1994, Doug Smith: Computer Czar--LuvDoug wrote:

> It's nice to see people interested in the community concept.

Well, it was nice to see a thoughtful response like y'all's.  :) My reply
here is unfortunately based on much enthousiasm but with too little sleep.
I also harp on Doug and Frank's identification of communities with
residential neighborhoods, perhaps more than they intended. 

> 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?"

Anyway, I think my original post fell into the second category above
(neighbors), but it is related to the other two issues
(locality&boundaries and what-are-we?).  Let me push y'all further on the
second, and I think it loosens some of the assumptions in your arguments
about the other issues.  Specifically, I find your arguments about
cyberspace convincing (to a very particular limit), and wonder first, if
you'd be willing to loosen (or rather respecify) your definition of
"locality". 

**Why should neighborhoods constitute the most important "places" or
localities if you will?**  

In my previous post, I pointed out that my community --back when I grew up
in Nashville-- was not my neighborhood, but rather the network of Chinese
Americans in the city.  Your responses suggest that I simply had no
community because (1) regardless of whether or not my white neighbors had
a community going, we were not involved, and (2) the "cross-town" nature
of our most valued social interations could not have encompassed "many
issues that affected [my] everyday life". 

On #1 I am in agreement, but on #2 I would have to vehemently disagree. 
While I agree with you that residential neighborhood cannot be dropped as
an important dimension of community, I think that workplace, religious
faith, and leisure space also generate equally important (if not more so)
"common interests".  And, to relate this to my Nashville experiences, I
would argue that race and ethnicity have been important coordinators for
the relative importance of these different "spaces", within what folks
identify as their community.  

Coming to your three definitions of community: (1) local territory, (2)
social institutions...of a local population [redundant?], and (3)
interaction != community.  I think you can argue the second without the
addendum "of a local population", and I think that there is indeed more to
community than an interactional field.  As you imply, it's more than a
sense of belonging, there's also common interests; community involves a
sense of having a common fate.  However, I don't see that where people
live has any necessary primacy in the development of these common
interests.  In sum, I think y'all are collapsing interests with a
particular locality, which --I think-- is not a bad thing to do, when the
two do coincide.  But my point is, they don't always. 

I think we're slipping between the cracks of two "social spheres" (for
lack of a better phrase): (1) the social worlds that determine our range
of options (ie who has which common interests), and (2) the social worlds
to which we orient our lives ("chosen" both rationally and through our
frames). Perhaps community is the way in which we articulate and practice
these two social spheres as if they were one world, in which case, neither
the residential neighborhood nor any other social world are necessarily 
community or necesarily not-community. 

If y'all agree with me so far (and y'all may not :), then community does
not require any *particular* type of locality.  However, does it require
*any* locality, ie what about Cyberspace?  Tentatively, I would say, "no";
rather community requires collective interests, of which locality is an
obviously strong attractor, but not the sole one.  

If so, then, are there cyberspace interests of "everyday" importance? 
Warning-- cop-out ahead:  personally, I'm not sure how methodologically to
assess interests on the Internet.  But until we come up with some ways, I
don't think we can dismiss cyberspace as categorically non-community. 

> Lastly, we never said that interaction on the internet should not be
> studied.

Doug and Frank, I certainly hope you do not take me as seeing your
positions as such.  As may be obvious, I would say the same thing ...about
neighborhoods.  ;)  What do y'all think?
 
tha j'ster

Jiannbin "J" Lee Shiao
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology
Operator, Instructional and Collections Computing Facility
University of California, Berkeley