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

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?