[iDC] PS pre-publication version of Postill 2008

Sun Jan 18 07:13:34 UTC 2009

Hi John,

Thanks for sharing the article below to the list.

Forgive me if a non-expert like myself gives some critique, but I tried 
to read the article and have trouble getting past the first sentences of 
the abstract or the Introduction. They state: "As the numbers of 
Internet users worldwide continue to grow, the Internet is becoming 
‘more local’." and "Until the mid-1990s the number of Internet users 
worldwide was small and most users could not help but communicate with 
others at great distances. But as the numbers continue to grow, the 
Internet is gradually becoming ‘more local’ (Davies and Crabtree 2004).

For one thing the article is missing the reference to "Davies,W. and J. 
Crabtree (2004) ‘Invisible Villages: Technolocalism and Community 
Renewal’, Renewal 12(1)". It can be found with mighty Google, but why do 
I have to do that? But more importantly the reference is not very 
convincing. But my real block stems from trying to correlate these 
statements with my personal experience. They makes me simply doubt this 
lead-in statement outright. As far as I can tell from my own, now almost 
pre-historic Internet memories - it started with me playing the first 
telnet based MUDs and browsing on CERN's NCSA Mosaic Version 1.0 on a 
time-share box in the Physics department at the USask around 1990 - the 
Internet was, at least at that particular time and from my specific 
perspective, already fully global AND local.

Some examples to illustrate: The newsgroup usask.forsale comes to mind, 
where undergrads and department heads would barter for stuff quite 
locally. Or the SLG Linux users group I helped found, complete with 
mailinglist to organize beer and wing nights in the local pub, and 
website which mediated local Installfests to get people to punt Windows 
3.11 in favor of kernel 1.0.9. Or the warez distribution crowd which 
used BBSs and networking but of course also the the local "sneakernet" 
to move stacks of floppies. Or the public libraries' Freenet which had 
both a modem for local callers and an Internet connection for the kicks 
of having global reach.

We probably talk about different things, you may say. But I believe, 
much more context on this proposed "increase of localism" is needed. 
Because without it, some readers might get lost right at the beginning 
of your text like myself.

--Andreas

John Postill wrote:
> PS there's a pre-publication version of my article here (with thanks to Tom
> Matrullo for his reminder about closed journals):
> http://johnpostill.co.uk/articles/postill_localising_net.pdf
>
> ------ Original Message ------
> Received: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:54:46 PM GMT
> From: "John Postill" <jpostill at usa.net>
> To: <t.bazzichelli at mclink.it>, <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] A Reflection on the Activist Strategies in the Web 2.0 Era
>
>   
>>> Future
>>> reflection on activism and hacker culture should therefore include
>>> a deep study of the language and rhetoric of presenting conceptual
>>> models and dynamics of networking.
>>>
>>>       
>> For some time now much of our sociological imagination has been reduced to
>>     
> a
>   
>> small set of entwined metaphors such as network, community and public
>>     
> sphere.
>   
>> Instead of searching for terminological fixes to the growing complexity of
>>     
> our
>   
>> world that play on these metaphors I would advocate an 'open lexicon' that
>> draws more profusely from the rich sociological and anthropological
>>     
> heritage
>   
>> in order to find new terms for new social phenomena. 
>>
>> Browse any social science glossary and you will find a wealth of perfectly
>> usable or recyclable terms that we hardly ever find in discussions of
>> activism, new media, Web 2.0 and so on, e.g. the venerable notion of
>>     
> 'action
>   
>> set' = 'a group of actors who operate for political purpose, but without a
>> unified, corporate identity' (see also 'action group') (Barnard and Spencer
>> 1996, Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology). 
>>
>> I have written about the paradigmatic prevalence of community/network-think
>> here:
>>
>> Postill, J. 2008 Localising the internet beyond communities and networks,
>>     
> New
>   
>> Media and Society 10 (3), 413-431
>> http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/3/413
>>
>> All the best with this initiative, and I look forward to a fruitful
>>     
> dialogue
>   
>> on this question
>>
>> John
>>
>> Dr John Postill
>> Senior Lecturer in Media
>> Sheffield Hallam University
>> Sheffield S11 8UZ
>> United Kingdom
>> j.postill at shu.ac.uk
>> http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/
>>
>>  
>>
>>
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