Three Metaphors And A Community

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Three metaphors and a community exploring the idea of virtual community

description

Virtual community presentation for the MSc in e-Learning.

Transcript of Three Metaphors And A Community

Page 1: Three Metaphors And A Community

Three metaphorsand a communityexploring the idea of “virtual community”

Presenter
Presentation Notes
I want to explore the idea of virtual community through three metaphors because metaphors seem to be inescapable when we talk of the digital - cyberspace, the blogosphere, the twitterverse. I want to look at blogging as it represents an established, rather than emergent, digital space for community development and interaction. It therefore may be something to learn from. I think this artefact on a virtual community may end up being more about the problems of virtual ethnography.
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Greater Surbiton

http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/

Presenter
Presentation Notes
The blog – and the ‘community’ around it – that I have chosen is called Greater Surbiton and is written by Dr Marko Attila Hoare, an academic from Kingston University where I work. It’s a political blog that occupies a space adjacent to (overlapping with) Marko’s professional research interests and personal story. Its political stance is not mine; my participation in the community is that of an observer. Can one be a participant observer?
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While I’m on the subject of concepts I have doubts about, I should say that I’m not sure about the idea of virtual ‘community’ either. I feel the term is overused. What would I use instead? Maybe ‘digitally mediated network’ or ‘technologically enabled sociability’? I need something that captures the idea that sites are not always something we belong to or that define us in some way. Sometimes they’re just places to visit, to attach to on a temporary basis. They’re not part of our identity; we don’t share a culture. Parts of the web are characterised by new forms of participation and displays of identity and affiliation. Is community the right word to describe these emerging forms of sociability?
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My first metaphor is anatomy. I want to get under the skin of a technology and pull out the bits that allow communities to be created and sustained. It might seem strange starting with the technology; after all, isn’t technology just the tool pressed into service of human needs? I think it’s more complicated than this though; there’s social shaping of technology but also technological shaping of the social. Blogging is an interesting example of this: it starts as a simple web publishing or broadcast tool but its affordances have enabled the creation and development of virtual communities. Image citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Anatomy_Lesson.jpg
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Let’s open up a blog. If we slice it apart can we reveal its separate sections and put them under the microscope? What are the parts of a blog that foster community? Many blogs are, of course, ‘broadcast’ tools in which posts are delivered to an audience. However, the affordances of blogs enable displays of identity ( the ‘about me’ section), association or affiliation (blog rolls, permalinks to other people’s blog posts) and dialogue (the comments box linking - pingbacks and track backs). To a degree then, blogs might be said to foster community: blog writers and blog readers loosely joined around shared topics of interest.
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Cartography is my second metaphor for thinking about virtual community. I started to think about this when discussing – on the boards and in my blog - the idea of the virtual ethnographic field site. Can we trace a border or boundary around a virtual space we are exploring? Does the creation of, for example, a Flickr or Facebook ‘group’ or the use of a shared hashtag in a Twitter interaction (e.g. distributed viewers watching Nick Griffin of the BNP on BBC’s Question Time) mark out a kind of online space? Can we confidently say: this is my virtual field site?
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In this well-known map of online communities you’ve just been looking at, blogs are visualised as islands in an archipeligo. They are separate land masses connected to one another by proximity. What does this mean in cyberspace? We may have to substitute the idea of proximity for connectedness. What connects separate blogs are the often reciprocal activities of constructing and displaying blogrolls, making comments about other selected bloggers’ posts and adding permalinks to them in posts of one’s own.� Blogrolls support the development of loosely coupled online communities of bloggers insofar as they enable a public display of affinity with like-minded bloggers who, although writing in separate blog space, are bound by common interests and positions. Reciprocal linking, as can be seen in the example of the Greater Surbiton blog, is common and a means of confirming relations based on shared interests and mutual appreciation. Finally, the ease of creation of permalinks, that is to say, hyperlinks to a specific post on another blog, further supports the possibility for conversation across different blog spaces and the creation and development of online communities. Some blogging software enables blog authors to receive a link in their comments box every time a blog post has been linked to from another blog. These updates, known as trackbacks, are a visible way of displaying connections between separate blogs and demonstrate how conversations in the blogosphere are frequently distributed between personal spaces and not confined to interactions via the comments tool.
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Greater Surbiton has a lengthy blogroll that appears a little way below the ‘About’ section of the right-hand column. The blogroll is partly about personal convenience (finding frequently-read blogs) but is also a very public display of affinity with the other bloggers listed who, in turn, list Greater Surbiton on their own blogroll. The blogroll links to other blogs but also incorporates news feeds from political commentators such as Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen and links to static web sites such as the home page of author and women’s rights activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
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The blogroll enables me to find easily

the blogs I read, but it also shows with

whom I feel an affinity, and with whom I

wish to associate. I don't necessarily

share the views of those on my blogroll,

but I wouldn't include any blog whose

views I found objectionable, even if they

were interesting.

Email from Marko Hoare.

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Occasionally, some bloggers introduce in a post an external blog which they have just added to their blogroll. The post in the Americans for Bosnia blog is an example of this and illustrates the culture of peer acknowledgement and sharing typical of many blog-based online communities.
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It would be inaccurate to portray political bloggers – even on a topic as defined as the history and politics of the Balkans – as a homogenous community. Indeed, I have observed many highly-charged and adversarial exchanges between bloggers from opposing political positions. One blog post called ‘The Curate’s Egg’ for example, cites a post from the Aaronovitch Watch blog which is a riposte to Marko’s introductory post to Greater Surbiton. Although Marko used the comments feature on the Aaronovitch Watch blog to justify his earlier criticism of writer and filmmaker, Michael Moore, which had provoked a charge of hypocrisy from one of the authors of Aaronovitch Watch, he used his own blog as the space for a more detailed rebuttal.
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Blog conversations, including adversarial exchanges such as those found between Greater Surbiton and Aaronovitch Watch are mainly distributed between the highly partisan personal spaces of the bloggers in dialogue. These rival bloggers locked in adversarial exchanges might be said to share a common digital culture: political blogging as intellectual pugilism, slugging it out in cyberspace. However, politically there is little shared culture.
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My third and final metaphor is archaeology. Part of the activity of online communities are accessible to me online. However, there is much that is not immediately visible to me as a researcher-cum-virtual ethnographer. � As a virtual ethnographer then, I need to be aware that our lives are lived online in various ways – some public, some less so – and that the online is often an extension of offline relationships (e.g. those formed at conferences, political meetings etc.). Our data collection methods must reflect the varied nature of how we display identity, affiliation and personal interests. �Image citation: http://www.conservationhalton.on.ca/ShowCategory.cfm?subCatID=1098
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I do have an extensive presence on the

web. […] Facebook is, for me, primarily a

social thing; my Facebook profile is, of

course, only readable by 'friends',

though a lot of my Facebook friends are

kindred spirits of the Eustonite left, and

we do sometimes have discussions.

Email from Marko Hoare.

Presenter
Presentation Notes
For example, Marko uses Facebook to communicate with some of the academics and journalists whose views he shares. To gain a better understanding I’d need to rely on the traditional tool of the ethnographer – the interview – as well as securing access to private sites Marko mentions.