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

Imagined Communities

• See Anderson1997

Community and Imagination

• Anderson's argument
• Applies to all forms of social organization
• Role of ritual is to create this consciousness

Imagination and Symbolic Form

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

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)
• Question: Does the internet help us connect with Greater Mind?
• Question: Is it more "situated"?