::fibreculture:: imagined networks

[Alexia Fry]

A bit of a by way:

Linda - on your piece in the nettime archives you briefly discussed a 
definition of community that is becoming more prevalent for virtual 
gatherings (based off Anderson's imagined community I assume?):

..."The imagined community never really knows itself, or who or what 
it is at any point in time, but the community <may> know that what it 
imagines itself to be is only a partial manifestation of itself -- a 
glimpse of what it might be now and of what it could be at another 
time. "...

I think that the spatial approach towards imaging such a network of 
people is interesting.  The SPACE/TIME approach seems to be a major 
body of work that is readily transferable to the flow between the 
physical place and context of the person and the virtual spaces that 
they wander through.  In particular your discussion of a 'community' 
in this setting is something that I am trying to come to terms with 
(in both an empirical and theoretical sense) in my own work.

While this definition sounds great, it is very difficult to 
operationalise to place into an empirical context or as a theoretical 
cornerstone.  This is currently how I've re-jigged the above concept 
to see if it will give something more tangible to play with.  If this 
stimulates a dialogue that'd be great.

--
A network of people can be constructed into a kind of 'group social 
intersection' by tracing the links of their relations around the 
intersecting medium(s) (in this case a forum, email list, web blog). 
Those links and nodes land somewhere in a 4th dimensional SPACE/TIME 
continuum while retaining some sort of physical practicalities and 
context.

   This 'socialising shape' places the 'node'/person into a network 
beyond their knowledge and immediate Space/Time - all of which most 
members seem to learn to negotiate voluntarily. 

In this context people are aware that they will intersect with people 
that they know and don't know, that they will meet new people, pass 
or be passed on and never know others.  At the core of this social 
intersection there is a cohesive sense of subject identification 
between participants (whether constructed as a prerequisite of the 
communication medium, mediated or created by the participants.)

A sense of 'community' in this case comes in through identification 
or interaction with expressed sentiments that are civically available 
in the medium where social intersection takes place. The negotiable 
point of how social intersections take place is the medium and 
individual motivation. 

Participants may be unaware of the exact dimensions of the social 
'shape' in which they are participating and the social implications 
of these dimensions (whatever they may be).  this awareness is 
largely dependent upon  the participant's computer literacy and drive 
to know.

the questions that I think may arise from the above definition are: 
Does hinging the social intersection upon a space/time theory somehow 
strip participants of 'motivation'?  What context does their 
understanding of the mediums that they participate in have? and what 
happens if the participant's intent  is to strip themselves of this 
space/time context?  How do actors regard themselves in this social 
context:  through their tempo-geographical positioning or the 
experiential side of their cerebral/corporal actions of the body?

Thanks for slogging through it (evening ramblings in this case). 
Alexia Fry
HDR, Deakin University






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.myspinach.org/pipermail/fibreculture/attachments/20050830/cc7eaab4/attachment.htm