Barry Wellman - Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Personalized Networking - 1 views
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Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them, each person has his/her own "personal community" (Wellman and Leighton 1979; Wellman 1999a).
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Jennifer Bundy on 28 Oct 11I wonder how the idea of a personal community fits into someone's identity. Particularly teens or young adults, who are still forming their identity. Does creating a group of people in a community centered on you prolong or expediate the process of identity formation?
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S Chou on 29 Oct 11SC - The Boyd article touches on this, and it seems like identity formation is as complicated as ever. I'm not sure if constant egocentric self-articulation changes the process of identity formation so much as it magnifies and reveals the process itself. People have always had to ultimately form and articulate identity on their own terms, in conversation/negotiation with groups and communities.
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individuating nature
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I see a duality in this individuating nature with the uprising of collective action online. Can the two really exist together and both thrive? Maybe this is similar to the "seemingly-conflicting" ideas of democracy and capitalism?
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SC - There is certainly individual choice and formation of individual identity within aspects of collective action. Social networks seem to make the connection and dissemination of both much more visible and active than before.
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forecast a century ago by E.M. Forster 1909
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Just as employers complain about workers' use of the Internet for personal matters, family members complain that their loved ones are tied to their computers during their supposed leisure hours
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Contextual sense and lateral awareness will diminish.
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A little concern about this idea - if you're not exposed to something, how do you know if you do or don't like it? Connecting to education, this gets at the idea of choice: should we let kids choose to study what they are interested in, or are there some things that everyone "just needs to know"?
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SC - There are two interesting strings to follow here, the idea of increased globalization and access to new ideas, and the idea of increased autonomy and personal choice. On one hand, we have access to more knowledge than ever but on the other hand we have greater ability to filter, ignore, and not participate since group norms hold less power over individuals. Maybe the key here is to teach kids to be interested, and to have the tools/skills needed to pursue their interests.
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the spread of wireless towers to physically isolated and impoverished "fourth world" areas
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I feel like this might be exaggerated (and this was written back in 2001!). I know of, and have been in, plenty of countries/areas where people do not have easy access to cell phones, much less the internet. Even in the United States, there are large groups of people - of all ages - that are not comfortable using a computer because of access issues
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SC - This also paints a picture of technology use as only for global good, not for increased advertising, consumerism, and replicating power structures/agendas that already exist. I do not agree with the idea that increased communication is necessarily better.
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neighbourhoods are not important sources of community.
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No more are people identified as members of a single group; they can switch among multiple networks.
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development of person-to-person connectivity has been influenced more by innovations in communication than in transportation.
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"The nuclear family may be on a comeback," a Rogers ATT mobile phone advertisement says on Toronto radio (CFMX, Feb. 13 2000:0813EST) with no sense of irony. Dad is bowling with the boys, Mom is on the road making presentations, son Dick is at his computer club, and daughter Jane is out of town visiting her biological Dad. Yet they all can stay connected at low cost through flat-rate national mobile phone calling.
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norms of this inherently person-to-person system foster the intrusion of intensely involving private behaviour into public space
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, and they seem to think that the impact of their actions on other people are absolutely inconsequential.
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Women have set the rules of the community game in place-to-place relationships and borne the burden of community keeping. If person-to-person community means that it is every person for him/herself, then we might expect to see a gendered re-segregation of community (as in Elizabeth Bott's England, 1957) with the possibility that men's communities will be smaller than networking-savvy women (Wright 1989; Moore 1990; Wellman 1992a, Bruckner and Knaup 1993).
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Research shows that people interact happily and fruitfully online (for the most part) and in ways similar to face-to-face contac
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Will the Internet promote two-person interactions at the expense of interactions happening in group or social network contexts?
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Agency is a need as well as an analytic category.
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But how does agency fit in with social norms? It was brought up in discussion that people are expected to always be available in some way
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SC - I think personal agency definitely gets overrun by some social norms, the difference between work norms and other community norms will yield different effects on agency as well.
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Fortunately, poorer groups in society have always networked heavily for the want of other resources. The problem will be to move from local networking and migrant networking to cyber-networking (Lomnitz 1977; Roberts 1978, Espinoza 1999). It may be then that network capital may provide a partial way of coping with a lack of other forms of capital.
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The Internet's very lack of social richness can foster contact with more diverse others.
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Despite the Internet's potential to connect diverse cultures and ideas, people are drawn to online communities that link them with others sharing common interests or concerns. They may be more diversified than "real life" community in their gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, but they still communicate about only a limited set of topics and ideas.
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Participants in online groups have strong interpersonal feelings of belonging, being wanted, obtaining important resources, and having a shared identity.
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Many ties operate in both cyberspace and physical space, used whatever means of communication is convenient and appropriate at the moment.
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This is a time for individuals and their networks, not for groups. The all-embracing collectivity (Parsons 1951; Braga and Menosky 1999) has become a fragmented, personalized network. Autonomy, opportunity, and uncertainty rule today's community game.
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Yet the rapid emergence of computer-mediated communications means that relations in cyberplaces are joining with relations on the ground
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it is when technological changes become pervasive, familiar and boring, that they affect societies the most
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relations in cyberplaces are joining with relations on the ground
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become less aware of the importance of gospel music to southern Americans, farm news to midwesterners, and hip-hop to northeastern city dwellers
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Telephones allow much more body movement and glances at others than does personal computing
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Their awareness and behaviour is totally in private cyberspace even though their bodies are in public space.
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email supports (a) within-network broadcasts; (b) personal communications between one or multiple friends, and (c) public address systems to strangers
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Would we be wiser to wonder if online interaction will develop its own strengths and create its own norms and dynamics?
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privatization may be responsible for the lack of informal help given to strangers who are in trouble in public spaces
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People must maintain differentiated portfolios of ties to obtain a variety of needed and wanted resources
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people with strong ties are more likely to be socially similar and to know the same persons, they are more likely to possess the same information. By contrast, new information is more apt to come through weaker ties better connected with other, more diverse social circles.
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Where person-to-person community is individualizing, role-to-role community deconstructs a holistic individual identity