Midterm Keyword Project: Community
As far as the development of the meaning of community is concerned, the uses of the English word community are broad, ranging from an indication of social organization, district, or state to sharing significant commonality to the unity found in event of communitas. The English word community comes from the Latin root communis, “common, public, general, shared by all or many”, which later transformed into the Old French word comunité, “commonness, everybody” in the 14thcentury. Before it referred to an aggregation of bodies or souls, community used to be affective, referring a quality of fellowship. Philosophers and sociologists boldly regard community as an ideal model of connection and bonding and a space where individuals unite for the sake of community. However, with the advent of digital community, the traditional notion about the community in a geographical sense is disrupted as individuals who are physically far away and disembodied beings can create community. It is a significant twist between the past and the past in terms of the meaning of community.
As for the premodern definition of community suggested by a sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, community has an intricate relationship with singleness of purpose. He regarded community as a traditional structure that techniques and trades, farming lifestyles and ethnic and religious bonding united humans with what Durkheim called a collective consciousness. From the perspective of Durkheim, a reclaiming of the collective consciousness is what modernity longs for while the division of labour and the rise of the individual greatly threaten it.
As for postmodern definition of community suggested by Victor Turner, he suggested that ritual rites of passage transform an individual from a state of social indeterminacy to a state of communal oneness and homogeneity. The result of a liminal individual’s reintegration into the group is a burdening because obligation and responsibility pertinent to the collective, for example defining others are imposed on the individuals. This is the composition and the very fundament of community. In other words, it is an ethical orientation outside oneself and toward others.The underlying meaning of community is citizenship belonging.
Regarding the concepts of the virtual and digital communities, many people may think the concepts of virtual and digital communities have no difference but actually they do have significant difference in terms of meaning. Virtual community is a quasi-geographic location, for example, a virtual gaming community located at a particular URL. Digital community is a temporary and centred around a shared interest or identity instead of a certain virtual location. In general, online community is an imprecise but practical term to refer to various forms of “relatively stable, long-term online group associations mediated by the internet or a similar network”.
Regarding the concept of communities formed on platforms, Nicholas Negroponte associatesdigitalization and platforms in the 19thcentury, suggesting that digitalization is to provide a communication and information platform for individuals who work in reality. Such a platform is a virtual space that is so close to the reality. In the past, traditional media actually is playing a role of platform by using content resources connecting the advertisers and audience. However, traditional media has not enough openness while the platforms nowadays not only maintain the authority of manual editing but also allow the users to use the digital platforms openly and freely.
Platforms put the values throughout the whole process of media value chain into consideration by creating a shared and co-established platforms and attracting diverse individuals’ participation. Platforms provide opportunities for every individual to actualize their own self-value by coordination. With regards to modes of communication, obviously social relationships have already replaced those nearly monopolised traditional media to be the information gateways. For example, the founder of Buzzfeed always think the value of information never stresses on the message buy the way of human interactions. Therefore, the vision of Buzzfeed is making the shared and service more human-oriented by exploring users’ emotions and personal interest. In practice, the content and the topics users usually see on Buzzfeed has undergone certain dissemination processing techniques in order to draw the attention from the users in a short period of time through content labels, retweet, discussion and resonance.
Jürgen Habermas categorize the human social behaviours into four action models:teleological action, normatively regulated action, dramaturgical action and communicative action. Such few kinds of social behaviours shape three object-oriented, other-oriented and self-oriented worlds. Users’ interaction on the platform Buzzfeed involves various action models, in that not only the teleological action of individuals acquiring information on platforms exists, but also shared values inflicted by the content. Most importantly, users comment, discuss, vote and express emotions like “like”, “laugh”, “love” through language and symbols.
Anti-authoritarianism reflected in Buzzfeed caters the youth’s mentality of getting tired of the workplace social circles, in that users are sick of formal photos and official social states. Easy and light content are provided for users without employment options, workplace promotion and experience slideshows. There would be everyday topics and interesting people and incidents presented in a colloquial way instead of that discourse structure with elitism. As such, content gets to gather users and spread across the social community by sharing.
Some scholars divide news industry into 4 periods of time, namely, the period of traditional media, the primary period of digital media, the secondary period of digital media and the period of social media. The chronological order of such periods reflects the process of the satisfaction of users’ needs and now people are in the last stage. The significant difference between the secondary period of digital media and the period of social media is the interactive relationships between users and such interactions add business values to media. A sociologist John Dewey pointed out that “journalism could reproduce the effects of traditional communities, uniting a public into a community”. The underlying meaning is that dissemination activities with each other allows individuals to form commonality and form the community, and thus community stresses personal will, coordination of entire action and personal maintenance of vitality.
With the advent of the mobile internet and the development of the internet technology, users are endowed the options of content for their own wants. They can become the disseminators through online interactions on the media platforms. Moreover, with the development of the development of mobile terminal and the popularization of smartphone, message communications of the users break the traditional boundary of time and space.
Without the limitations of time and space, users are allowed to establish communities with both people they know in reality and strangers they have never met in person through mobile terminal. By doing so, it satisfies their social needs and connect the interpersonal relationships between the reality and the virtual world. Furthermore, compared with traditional media, users are able to acquire relatively more specified and accurate cultural identity through mass information, interest groups as well as interactions within the community.
Besides, in this era of cybereconomy, users on digital media are targeted as the major consumers, and thus their communities not only play a role of users but also a role of consumers. Ultimately, the cultural and emotional needs of the communities start to influence the culture production of media.
All in all, the transformation of media in this era of mobile media brings brand new features like convenience and openness while it also triggers issues, for instance, users becoming overly dependent on media, inordinate amounts of scattered information, to name buy a few.
The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong back in 2014 is also a case in point when it comes a current example of the community. In the news, it is reported that the sense of being part of a global online community has encouraged the protest movement. Jessica Fan, an Occupy volunteer, posted photos of Hong Kong protesters on Facebook, and received encouragement from people in places ranging from France and Ireland to Myanmar. This has a powerful psychological effect.
“When they share their support, I feel happy that I’m not alone when I’m fighting for Hong Kong democracy,” Fan said.
The above-mentioned can obviously relate to the major feature of community, namely having commonality and in the case of the protest community, the commonality amongst members of the community is the pursuit of democracy as it is a value that could never be bounded by space and time. As the interviewee said, people from all over the world are able to support the protest. It is a global community regardless of race, gender and nationality.
In light of my research, the formation of the community is when two or more people with the same sense of belonging and collectiveness gather together and they affect each other. In the result, they share the same or particular goal or expectation, forming the community. Nowadays, people are paying more and more attention to platforms of we-media and eventually become part of the community of we-media. Therefore, the community has to have a higher threshold in that users have to have similar or particular interests, needs or features altogether.
Based on the existing definitions, I believe that the original essay author has insights despite the fact that these essays were written in 2016. Modern mass communication technologies regain a semblance of premodern, pre-technological community, thereby reinstating consensus in social life. As John Dewey said, journalism could reproduce the effects of traditional communities, uniting a public into a community. Also, Robert Park, working with the Chicago School of sociologists also pointed out that the role of newspaper “reproduce, as far as possible, in the city the conditions of life in the village”. In other words, a collective of individuals who emerge in consequence of their relation one to the other. Moreover, Dewey’s concern is basically same as the concern about digital communication today which is — a lack of face-to-face communication in industrialized life.
Reference:
1. Driver, S. (2017). An ethics of networked caring within young people’s everyday lives. Feminist Media Studies, 17(2), 297–301.
2. Emily, P. (2014). Social media and the Hong Kong protests. The New Yorker.
3. Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New media & society, 12(3), 347–364.
4. Peters, B. (Ed.). (2016). Digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture (Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.
5. Lindgren, S. (2017). Digital media and society. Sage.
