Example?
This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Sep 2007, by Adam Bohannon.
-
02 Jun 09
-
04 Nov 08
-
16 Mar 08
Barbara LindseyCommunity or Collaboration on the Internet?
-
03 Jan 08
-
14 Sep 07
-
For its users, this networked social system or virtual community is, as cybertheorist Sandy Stone put it, "first and foremost a community of belief" [2].
-
Certainly, the traditional notion of community is founded on assumptions about consensus, rationality and collectivity that do not translate well to virtual spaces like the internet. In a virtual environment, collaboration displaces community, teasing out, as it seems to do, the possibility of radical encounters with the 'other'. Informed by a postmodern sense of irony, fragmentation and multiciplicity, collaboration undermines normative and unitary social formations in today's virtual environments.
-
As Stone argues, "the distinction between inside and outside has been erased and along with it, the possibility of privacy" [4]. In this way, the internet acts as a terrain in which the public/private distinction is deconstructed and in which those who engage in online social interactions are not necessarily inscribed according to this set of oppositions.
-
Those who socialise online do so within both the public and private realms simultaneously, making such categories impossible to sustain. In creating disorder through the dissolution of public/private distinctions, the internet, as a frame for a multitude of encounters, represents a departure from the political rationality in which, according the philosopher Michel Foucault, the "integration of the individuals in a community or totality results from a constant correlation between an increasing individualisation and the reinforcement of this totality" [5].
-
While "community" describes a nebulous social form, it nevertheless alludes to an entity that is whole and often geographically contingent - homogenous - complying with ideas about metanarratives, rootedness and permanence that deny and falsify difference. Computer networks impinge on that order by providing an alternative field in which to perform connection and interactivity, to activate difference and fragmentation and to attenuate rootedness to a place.
-
Simultaneously, this shift does not necessarily disavow embodiment or location. Psychologist Sherry Turkle evokes the text-based virtual gaming sites known as MUDs [8] as a cyberperformance of community that implies "difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity and fragmentations. Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word, idem, <!--SELECTION--> <!--/SELECTION--> meaning 'the same'" [9]
-
Similarly, it contradicts notions of community insofar as they rely on commonality and sameness. For author, Howard Rheingold, permeability between the online and off-line is essential for the word "community" to be applied to virtual social worlds [10]. This contingency raises the question of whether community can be formed via virtual networks - whether it is a valuable means of describing and knowing virtual social experience - when it must be made to work via the intersection of online and off-line experience.
-
Of course, not all internet-based collaboration is inherently deceitful - even though there is an element of uncertainty - rather, it permits the performance of more fluid and mutable identities.
-
Add Sticky NoteAs such, these identities are direct responses to the moment, emergent from the encounter rather than framed by the mores, prohibitions and inscriptions of off-line society and subjectivity.
-
-
With the absence of cues such as sound and sight in a social encounter, the information that net users can obtain about other net users is only what is disclosed: no one knows who you are. Turkle points out that "virtual communities ranging from MUDs to computer bulletin boards allow people to generate experiences, relationships, identities and living spaces that arise only through interaction with technology" [12]
-
the cyborg operates via interface, connectivity and multiplicity to actively subvert traditional ideas about identity that rely on the notion of authenticity and, therefore, fixity.
-
The implication is that whatever social networks and identities emerge on the internet, they are constitutively different from their precedents, from those external to it.
-
Young proposes that a politics of difference be developed to replace "community as the normative ideal of political emancipation ... A model of the unoppressive city offers an understanding of social relations without domination in which persons live together in relations of mediation among strangers with whom they are not in community" [23].
-
It is advocated here that computer networks provide a utilitarian space for establishing this model and appraising the means by which a semblance of collaboration may be achieved therein: to encounter and exchange with the stranger is to collaborate in interactivity ad connection to achieve unknown and unspecified results.
-
Central to the technologies of the self is an attention to the passion of knowledge, a passion which does not reify knowing but rather entails a probability that one occasionally will lose oneself, only to find it in another place, caught up with other knowledge and people, in the reflection of another angle and perspective [24].
-
Such commitment to the ongoing theorising of the self operates as a political position from which to activate the technologies of social and personal formation in which difference has value and by which unitary formulations of community are destabilised. Such an equation relates to the proposition that social relations as performed online are akin to those of the unoppressive city which Young describes as "places where strangers are thrown together" [26]. In this setting, "politics must be conceived of as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance" [27].
-
According to Turkle, the internet is the site of reconstructed relationships whereby community and identity can be perceived as "cultural work in progress" rather than as a given [16]. As performed in cyberspace, encounters are measured as moments - the ethics of which are not always apparent - in which subject positions are not fixed.
-
For philosopher Alphonso Lingus, western societies have deferred to a practice of the rational community that conceals and excludes:
Beneath the rational community, its common discourse of which each lucid mind is but the representative and its enterprises in which the efforts and passions of each are absorbed and depersonalised, is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the one with who he had nothing in common, the stranger [29].
-
Add Sticky NoteLocating this type of accountability as community is problematic for it evokes the binarist antagonism or individual versus community in which the [male] individual with attributed rights is privileged over the [female] community, inscribed with an ethic of care. According to feminist and philosopher Iris Marion Young, "individualism and community have a common logic underlying their polarity, which makes it possible for them to define each other negatively. Each entails a denial of difference and desire to bring multiplicity and heterogeneity into unity, although in opposing ways" [18].
-
Schismogenesis
-
-
The encounter implicit in collaboration represents the site for re-inscribed cultural and identity politics in which, as Turkle describes, "we have learned to take things at interface value. We are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real ... We join virtual communities that exist among people communicating on computer networks as well as communities in which we are physically present."[19].
-
According to Turkle, "in computer-mediated worlds, the self is multiple, fluid and constituted with machine connections; it is made and transformed by language; sexual congress is an exchange of signifiers; and understanding follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis" [32]. Technology becomes facilitative in the deconstruction of normative categories of interaction. The displacement of such constrictive conventions permits internet users to generate their own modes of relating, modes that define them as a network of strangers, produced and reproduced as and by collaboration.
-
Collaboration, representing both the connection and the flight, provides the context for more detailed consideration of virtual social networks as a viable means of attending to desire, diversity and difference without subscribing to the legitimising force of consensus.
-
For psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva, radical strangeness is built into human psyches and place-bound identities. In cyberspace, and in-between space, the borders of oneself are both threatened and drawn, blurring one's identity, making currency of the decentred self. As writer Noelle McAfee put its in discussing Kristeva's work, "even though the experience is profoundly unsettling, it produces an awareness of one's being there" [33].
-
In cyberspace, anonymity renders everyone who enters a stranger and also strangers to each other.
-
In the intermediary space of the internet, one only has awareness of oneself and all others are strangers. McAfee states, "the foreigner presents an opportunity and not an abyss. By being shaken loose from the 'they', this self sees the radical strangeness of others as the continual possibility for being a subject, a split subject whose mirror is always partial. Without completion, possibility thrives." [34].
-
Consensus denies difference and partiality, imposing it own hegemony. The social encounters resulting from this shift are inherently different from the utopian "ideal of community [which] entails promoting a model of face-to-face relations at best" [21]. In the fragmented space provided by the internet, consensus is impossible and irrelevant. So framed, collaboration attends to multiplicity and partiality without subscribing to or aspiring to consensus as a manifestation of commonality and an articulation of the unitary. As an act of collaboration, social encounters can subscribe to and "develop a self-conscious politics of partiality ... which does not absorb difference with a pre-given and predefined space but leaves room for ambivalence and ambiguity" [22].
-
Community
-
Community
-
Add Sticky NoteCommunity
-
<b>"Community"</b>: similar character; agreement; identity: <i>community of interests.</i>
-
-
Community
-
It is in these encounters with strangers, outside the realm of the nation-state or the rational community, that Kristeva suggest an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable. Such an assertion correlates with Haraway's formulation of cyborg politics in which the politics of encounter are neither naturalised not absolute, but in a constant state of flux, open to negotiation, sociability, perversion and regeneration.
-
Virtual environments provide for encounters with the stranger who, in most off-line contexts would be seen as an interloper requiring assimilation rather than as an opportunity for perverting unitary formations of the social and generating expanding fields of social interactivity and connectedness.
-
Public Stiky Notes
Page Comments
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.