‘Virtual Communities’/ Social ‘Webs’ - Hacking Social Life On-Line

Prospectus for a research seminar for seniors (ANTH 451 / MDIA 499)

(Fall 2008 W 4:10-6:40)

Dr. Jon W. Anderson

Anthropology Department

(inquiries to: anderson@cua.edu)

‘Virtual community’ may be an idea whose time is past, but now there's Web 2.0 for ‘hacking’ a social life on-line. The first conceptualization of on-line social life mediated through the Internet and mobilizing its properties was generalized from computer enthusiasts’ electronic bulletin boards and newsletters that were supposed to unite scattered persons with common interests in cyberspace. With recent development on the World Wide Web, attention has shifted to a new set of applications such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster called ‘social webs’, along with projects from Wikipedia to the Open Source Software movement, new iterations of on-line gaming and the rise of blogs that attract interest in business, politics and NGOs. Common throughout have been views of cyberpace as a social place and ‘social software’ that attempts at a minimum to leverage interaction and maximally to leverage solidarity in an increasingly de-territorialized world.

What do we know about and how can we systematically study the forms that social life takes on-line? What are relations between information-seeking and community-building? What kind of community can there be without face-to-face interaction that characterised human society for millennia or the institutions that grew up with modern mass society, including mass media? Do seemingly open possibilities for interaction through the Internet make new democracy, or something else? What kinds of communities arise or find expression in cyberspace? Is there anything to notions such as the ‘death of distance’, de-territorialisation and network organization and, if so, what features do they convey to virtual communities or electronic webs? What does social software do?

This seminar will look at findings, new thinking and new thinkers among social scientists, specialists in communications and media who focus on the internal dynamics of on-line communities, and particularly on newer forms such as social webs. Students can develop case studies and comparisons of forms in which they participate or consider participating. The goal of this seminar is to develop the next generation of analysts to follow the visionaries and critics with skills in bottom-up analysis.

We will start with some recent studies that address such questions from the bottom up, such as:
• Communities in Cyberspace, edited by Marc Smith & Peter Kollock (Routledge 2001)
• The Network Inside Out, by Annelise Riles (University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
• My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition, by Geert Lovink (NAi Publishers, 2003)
• Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society, edited by Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson & Geert Lovink (Routledge, 2006)
• BlogTalks Reloaded: Social Software Research & Cases edited by Thomas N. Burg & Jan Schmidt. (Norderstedt. 2007).
• “Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community into being on Social Network Sites,” by danah boyd. (First Monday, December 2006).
Plus other works by Clay Shirkey, John Palfrey, Lawrence Lessing, Marc Granovetter, Barry Wellman and, probably, revisiting Howard Rheingold’s seminal The Virtual Community (1993). The seminar has a BlackBoard with a selection of readings, useful links and online discussion space.