ANTH245 2007-10-30

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Do Virtual Communities Exist?

Recap

Databasification

• Impact of symbolic forms on how people are represented
  • The old cliché of being a number
  • But also a self as pattern

Institutions

• Corporations
• Governments

Ideologies

• Communicative transparency
• Privacy
• Bodies vs. People

Segue

• Today we consider the phenomenon of blogging -- a catch-all phrase -- and community
• What ideologies?
• A counter-institution?

Intro

The WELL

• The WELL
• Rheingold, The Virtual Community
• Wired, "The Epic Saga of The Well"
• Pre-web, i.e. Telnet and Gopher.
• Mainly forums and bulletin boards (BBSs) and a community of self-selected internet users.
• One can argue that the sense of community pre-existed the WELL.

YouTube

• What defines a Community?
• Open Letter to YouTube: Let's talk Community!

MySpace

• EMO
• What is the connection between Emo and MySpace?

Daily Kos

• The Blog
• Video of conference
• Lieberman

Community and Society

• Tonnies, 1887, Community and Society (excerpts)
• Two Kinds of social organization based on two kinds of "will"
  • Community and Society, or Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
  • Connecting Will and Society -- I call this "psycho-social" mapping
  • Where anthropology likes to hang out
• Will: Essential vs. Arbitrary
  • Precisely analogous to Bateson's Purposive Mind and and the Unconscious (which is closer to Great Mind)
  • Also, arbitrary will = planning mentality (it is goal oriented)

Characteristics of each

Community

• Order based on consensus of wills
• Governed by ritual, gossip, etc. (mutual calibration)
• Developed and "ennobled" by folkways, mores, and religion
• Individual subordinate to the whole

Society

• Order based upon a union of rational wills
  • Governed by convention, agreement, and political legislation
• Ideological justification in public opinion
• Individualism per se -- "[U]nder certain conditions and in some relationships, man appears as a free agent (person) in his self-determined activities and has to be conceived of as an independent person"
• Note connection between society, privacy and trade
  • "It is through the merchants that the technical conditions for the national union of independent individuals and for capitalistic production are created."
  • Corporations create/require Privacy
• The concern for privacy emerges under these conditions

Imagined Communities

• See Anderson1997
• Nationalism = Society's Community
  • "The state, as the reason of Gesellschaft, should decide to destroy Gesellschaft or at least to reform or renew it. The success of such attempts is highly improbable."

Community and Imagination

• State Anderson's argument
  • Imagined
  • Limited
  • Sovereign
  • Communal
• Applies to all forms of social organization
• Role of ritual is to create this consciousness
• In a way, a critique of Tonnies, who made a stark distinction ...

Imagination and Symbolic Form

• Newspapers
• The Novel
• Language
• Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
• Also: folklore, etc.

Questions

• Is the internet the new nationalism? (Internationalism)
• Does the internet undermine nationalism?
  • If no to the first, and yes to the second, where does that put us?
• Does the internet compensate for the alienation of modern society?
• Does the internet help us connect with Greater Mind?
• Is it more "situated"?
• In which is privacy as value?

Salam Pax

• Describe
• Look at site
• Ask: what kind of community?