Mon, 12 Dec 1994 07:00:11 -0800 for Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 10:00:45 -0500 (EST) From: blyden b potts Subject: Re: your mail To: "Frank D. Beck" On Fri, 9 Dec 1994, Frank D. Beck wrote: > No, we realize that there have been many definitions of community. However, > these definitions have centered around three elements: locality, social > organization and interaction. The last of these exists in every definition. > To us, the best definition comprises all three elements with an emphasis on > how interaction produces the locality and the social organization. I am sorry, I misstated. You do recognize many definitions, but as you say, centered on three elements. I should have said that you set up three bases for defining community and then decide that the internet cannot exhibit community. This does not really affect my argument at all, but I admit that you do not exclude multiple variations on these bases. As for some people who wrote suggesting that there were not so many, I can give only a limited reply: I have never actually read the article, but have several times seen it cited that G. Hillery Jr. (1955) found no fewer than 94 different definitions of community. Surely a few more have been added since. Almost all of those definitions (Bell and Newby, 1971) involved an interactional component, but a significant number did not require an area, locality or territorial component. I took a quick look at Claude Fisher's *To Dwell Among Friends* the other night; while he recognizes a spatial component, he sees it theoretically as egocentric (i.e. an aspect of interaction), though that is not how he operationalizes it. Gerald Suttles and writers following him (e.g. Ahlbrandt) suggest a definition of community which is not spatially determined, though they recognize that more traditional definitions tend to have an area component. Barry Wellman working on community from a network perspective has written considerably on community and has suggested that community is an egocentric network without spatial definition. Finally, Weber as translated by Gerth and Mills suggests that communal action "is oriented to the feeling of the actors that they belong together." This, along with other references in Weber suggests that community has an interactional base, but is primarily a cognitive state, with no implication that it needs to be associated with a locality; a perspective which may be found in other writers (e.g. Mary Rousseau) > >Curiously, the very use of the word space (in cyberspace) would suggest that > >we'd better define locality and space before we throw out all these > >definitions. > > Well, evidently you didn't want to take a shot at it. To us, it is > interaction which defines boundaries, but it is the SUBJECT of the > interaction (discourse and action) which separates a community field from > other interactional fields. No, I will not take a shot at it. If this was seen as a cheap shot, I apologize. It was only a creative aside for me, which suggested that the definition could be played with in creative ways. I certainly have no intention at this point of following that up. But now we come to the heart of the matter. My critique is this: You have recognized community as an interactional field. I accept that. You have further specified that what makes a community as a distinct type of interactional field is the locality or spatial aspect of the interaction. This I personally disagree with, but here is what I see as the real problem: You have, definitionally, a priori excluded social phenomena from being community. If you are going to do this I expect some rational or logic for the definitional decision. This you do not provide. An analogy might be a definition which says that Dinosaurs are creatures which died out however many millions of years ago. Such a definition proscribes the possibility of finding a dinosaur alive today. Similarly, defining community in such an arbitrary way prevents us from spotting what are identical phenomena, except for this arbitrary element. Perhaps you do not think it is arbitrary, but given that the social importance of community seems to have relatively little to do with space (from my perspective, at least), I would have to say it is an arbitrary barrier. > Look, we spent all day THINKING about our response to other people's > comments about our earlier post. We laid out a theoretically grounded > defense based on Harold Kaufmann and Ken Wilkinson's work on community. If > you would like to engage in a theoretical discussion of these ideas then > we would suggest that you try writing something besides insinuation. I fail to see what the length of time you spent preparing your argument, or I spent on mine has to do with anything, except that you are insinuating that I didn't think about what I was saying. I assure you that is not the case. > We recognize that every theory has a purpose. The benefit of the interactional > definition of community is that it focuses on peoples well-being where they > live. If a social problem arises in a locality, it is community action that > facilitates a solution. > What does a non-local community definition, which allows you to describe > "Cyberspace" (whatever that is) as a community, get us? One possibility > is that it allows us to think more favorably of this technology. You argue > that interaction on the net produces community; community is good; therefore > the net is good. Isn't that special? Why should locality in the geographic sense be so privileged? I think I've explained that what my non-local definition (and I admit, I haven't given you A definition, only challenged the locality aspect) allows us to look for community more broadly, as I said above. You seriously misread into my argument by suggesting that I say the net DOES produce community, and that I think community is good. Community has negative consequences and costs as well as benefits, and I don't know that the net does produce community, but I can look. Blyden Potts