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3011: Geographies of Cyberspace
Virtual Communities
Martin Dodge
([email protected])
Lecture 9, Monday 6th December 2004
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace
Communications = Community?
many would argue that the true power of cyberspace is
that it provides new media which fosters new social
interaction between groups of people
to these commentators, one of the most basic human
needs is to communicate and interact with others,
and cyberspace - through email, newsgroups, mailinglists, bulletin-boards, chat rooms, MUDS, networked
games, avatar virtual worlds, blogs, p2p - is providing
new media through which this communication can
occur and in many cases flourish
do these new means of sociability give rise to new
types of community? and what are the implications for
other forms of social interaction based on place?
A key debate in social science analysis of the Internet
CMC is damaging,
> isolation and sense
of alienation
No real change,
CMC just part of existing
social networks
Community,
is it changing?
CMC is positive means to
enhance community
and renewal of place
No real change,
CMC is a parallel
world with little impact
on the rest of peoples lives
What is community?
do you live in a community?
do you know your neighbours by sight? do you say
hello? would you ask them a favour? Would you invite
them round for tea?
how many people do you know? how many do you
speak to face-to-face?
are you involved in lots of overlapping communities? Or
are they really individual networks of family, friends,
contacts?
how much time do you send in social activities as
opposed to individual /solitary things?
do you give time to groups voluntarily,without the
expectation of reward?
are you involved in civic activities because you think
they make a difference to your community?
Defining ‘community’
like many social terms community is hard to
define
my desk dictionary, “Group of people etc living
in the same locality or having same religion,
race, profession, interests, etc”
shared ideas and interests give rise to common
norms, feelings and goals
share space gives rise to communal sense of
place
social theorists have long argued about nature
of community and how it is changing
Defining ‘community’
Tonnies (1887) conception of community into
2 distinct ideals
gemeinschaft - natural, organic groups of people
bounded by long established family ties, shared
customs, language. Civic minded as right thing to
do
gesellschaft - rationally conceived groups that
centred around networks of individual interests.
Bonds forged through exchanges and contracts.
Civic engagement as beneficial to the individual
shift to modernity in European with rapid
urbanisation and industralisation was shifting
community
Defining ‘community’
CMC is seen as ‘impacting’ on gemeinschaft type of
‘natural’ placed-based community in a negative
fashion, more towards non-local, technologicallymediated gesellschaft community
argued that gemeinschaft view of community is
nostalgic longing for a past that (may) never existed
Castells’ notes (p. 124), “for urban sociologists this is a
very old discussion, which reproduces previous debates
between those seeing the process of urbanization as
the disappearance of meaningful forms of community
life, to be replaced by selective, weaker ties between
households scattered in the anonymous metropolis,
and those identifying the city with liberation of people
from traditional social control.”
Life in a Virtual World
“People in virtual communities use words on screens to
exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual
discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge,
share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip,
feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games,
flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk.
People in virtual communities do just about everything
that people do in real life but we leave our bodies
behind. You can’t kiss anybody and nobody can punch
you on the nose, but a lot can happen within those
boundaries. To the millions who have been drawn into it,
the richness and vitality of computer-linked cultures is
attractive, even addictive.” (Rheingold, 1993, p. 3)
Communities in cyberspace
cyberspace allows the formation of communities
that are free of the constraints of place
communities in cyberspace are sustained and
grounded by communicative practice, not
geographic propinquity
a sense of community is based upon new modes
of interaction and is centred on common
interests and affinity
within cyberspace individual participants can:
circumvent the geographical constraints of the
material world
take a more pro-active role in shaping their own
virtual community and their position within it
Communities in cyberspace
analysts agree that virtual communities exist
all communities are imagined, and as long members
share a common imaginative structure, a community
can be said to exist.
many online communities are self-sustaining and rich
in diversity
people would not invest so much time and effort if
they did not gain some sense of social cohesion or
community from their virtual actions
Watson (1997, quoted in Fernback, p.213), notes
“The term ‘virtual’ means something akin to
‘unreal’… My experience has been that people in the
offline world tend to see online communities as
virtual, but that participants in the online
communities see them as quite real.”
Communities in cyberspace
Where there is significant divergence
of opinion is over the extent to which
(1) these online communities provide an
alternative to geographic (‘offline’)
communities
(2) they are placeless
Online communities as alternatives
communities in geographic space are fragmenting and
losing cohesion due to cultural and economic
globalisation
society is suffering increasingly from a condition of
placelessness
communities little more than geographically defined
and administered land units which consist of atomised
individuals who share little common historical
consciousness or beliefs
online communities offer an alternative and antidote
to social alienation and placelessness experienced in
geographic communities
new forms of communities based upon our interests
and affinity, rather than coincidence of location
Online communities as alternatives
just like real-world communities there are
behavioural norms, differing personalities,
shared significance and allegiances
the Internet fosters the growth of distinct
cultures grounded in communicative practice
commonly agreed protocols and ‘laws’
advent of distinctive referent language
(abbreviations, jargon, symbols)
the formation of strong social networks
Online communities as alternatives
Kevin Robins (1995) argues that online communities
are at the very best self-selecting, psuedocommunities.
he feels it is a serious misnomer to directly equate
communication with communion and community
he questions the quality of relationships forged and
sustained through cyberspace
dialogue is specific to few and yet read by a larger
unknown set of participants who may or may not be
considered community members;
conversations are less inhibited, nonconforming and
relatively free of personal consequences;
correspondence is predominantly between virtual
strangers - when the machine is turned off the only
things known are those given, those written
“We are who we are because of the places in which
we grow up, the accents and friends we acquire by
chance, the burdens we have not chosen but
somehow learn to cope with. Real communities are
always local - places in which people have to put
down some roots and are willing to put up with the
burdens of living together. The fantasy of virtual
communities is that we can enjoy the benefits of
community without its burdens, without the daily
effort to keep delicate human connections intact.
Real communities can bear those burdens because
they are embedded in particular places and evoke
enduring loyalties. In cyberspace, however, there is
nowhere that a sense of place can grow, and no way
in which the solidarities that sustain human beings
through difficult times can be forged.”
Kevin Robins (1995) counters
• Rheingold’s vision of cyberspace as an escape hatch
Online communities are not separate
Wellman and Gulia (1999) note that online and
geographic communities are in fact remarkably
similar in some respects.
It has long been the case that a person’s
community does not necessarily live within
walking distance.
geographic communities have been replaced by
social networks that are spread out over a wide
terrain, and which are sustained by a variety of
media.
they contend that the division between
geographic and virtual is not helpful -- one is
simply an extension of the other
Online communities are not separate
It is the relationship between people that is important,
not the medium of communication
Social networks maintained exclusively in cyberspace
are thus not pale imitations of ‘real’ networks, or
substitutions for these networks, they are just another
form of network, a subset of an individual’s total
network
Castells’ (p. 129) argues that “The new pattern of
sociability in our societies is characterized by
networked individualism”
people are adapting Internet media to fit their
networked life, holding strands of connections and
making/breaking new ones as needed
Web portals to encourage civic
engagement
cyberspace is often used to try and ‘reconnect’
members of a community and foster a sense of
place.
many cities now have websites devoted to
community relations and development
Many communities are using cyberspace to develop
cross-community and cross-issue alliances to help
fight particular concerns
Instead of replacement, geographic communities
are being augmented by online interactions
see ‘Closer to the state’ article from The Guardian
Cyberspace communities as
placeless communities
cyberspace is commonly conceived as being
aspatial
“There is no there there”
thus has no spatiality and thus no sense of place
however, online interactions are often structured
through a variety of geographic metaphors
for example, cyberspace is replete with the
vocabulary of place - nouns, such as rooms,
lobbies, highway, frontier, cafes; and verbs, such as
surf, inhabit, build, enter.
Cyberspace communities as
placeless communities
Couclelis (1998) details that the use of these
geographic metaphors - the spatialisation of
cyberspace - is an attempt to translate
media into domains familiar and comfortable
to users.
cyberspace is built out of the ideas and
language of place
employment of these metaphors to create
sites of interaction engenders an online
spatiality.
Cyberspace communities as
placeless communities
Taylor (1997, p. 190) -- ‘to be within a
virtual world is to have an intrinsically
geographic experience, as virtual worlds are
experienced fundamentally as places.’
new places, and new spatialities, are being
formed online
Batty (1997: 339): the many components
that comprise cyberspace each have ‘their
own sense of place and space, their own
geography.’
Correll’s study of a ‘bar’
study of an online lesbian café
describes how patrons constructed an
elaborate café setting using textual
descriptions and contextualised all their
interactions within this setting
construction (spatialisation) of this shared
setting created a common sense of reality
which grounded communication
the locale needed for community in geographic
space was simulated online
spatialisation was the secret to the community
being a success
30 Days in Alphaworld
Sought to chart empirically the process of virtual
place-making
created a new virtual world that any person could
inhabit and build within.
monitored in detail the building of urban structures
and social interaction
users built a diverse range of structures and a strong
core community, who met and interacted regularly,
developed.
AlphaWorld consists of hybrid places - lacking the
materiality of geographic space but yet having a
powerful mimetic quality
contains enough geographical referents and structure
to make them tangible
30 Days in Alphaworld
‘sense of place’ is centred around the
activities of claiming land, designing and
building homesteads
space is transformed into meaningful
places, and by social interaction between
the inhabitants.
leads to specific forms of socio-spatial
practice: the playing with identity, the
creation of community, land disputes,
virtual vandalism, policing.
space, place and socio-spatial processes
are central to online interactions within
the Alphaworld
Embodied Spaces
reason that so many analysts have
misunderstood cyberspace as placeless,
spaceless media is because they have conceived
cyberspace as a separate realm divorced from
geographic space
this conception falls into the trap of treating
cyberspace as ‘locations of the sublime’ (as
powerful, dislocated, deterministic paraspaces)
cyberspace rather than being a separate realm
to geographic space is merely an extension of it
- it is embodied
Conclusion
Cyberspace does have implications for the idea
of community
But its impact is neither utopian or dystopic – it
does not provide an alternative or counter
community in ‘real space’
Rather cyberspace is another medium through
which social networks can be formed and
sustained
Reading for this lecture
Key article
Fernback J (1999) "There is a There There: Notes
Towards a Definition of Cybercommunity"
Castells, Internet Galaxy - “Virtual Communities
or Network Society”, Chapter 4, pages 117-136
Reading for this lecture
Supplemental readings:
• Rheingold H., (1993), Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier, Addison-Wesley, New York
• Wellman B. and Gulia M. (1999) "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone:
Virtual Community as Community”
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace/wellman_gulia_netsurfers.pdf
•Robins, K. (1995) Cyberspace and the world we live in. In
Featherstone, M. and Burrows, R. (Ed) Cyberspace, Cyberbodies and
Cyberpunk: Cultures of technological embodiment. Sage, London,
pp. 135-156
• Taylor, J. (1997) The emerging geographies of virtual worlds. The
Geographical Review 87: 172-192. [Available thru JSTOR]
• Correll, S. (1995) The ethnography of an electronic bar: The lesbian
cafe. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24: 270-298
Next steps
Friday: DCA presentations
10 minutes per group
demo website, explain mapping strategy
all material needs to be online
remember website and presentation are worth
40% of the coursework mark