[iDC] PS pre-publication version of Postill 2008

John Postill jpostill at usa.net
Mon Jan 19 21:33:39 UTC 2009


Hi Andreas

That's fascinating firsthand information about local and other internet uses
and I think you're probably right about my tale of entry being a bit wobbly -
will have to think about this in future writings. Many thanks.

That said, my article is not really about whether or not the internet is
becoming 'more local'. My main aim is to draw attention to the current state
of local-level internet studies and more specifically to the predominance of
an unhelpful conceptual pairing in this area of research, namely community and
network. Thus we find a whole area of work that goes under the label of
'community informatics' in which one key concern is how to help local
'communities' through 'network technologies' in the 'network society'. We also
find scholars who set out to study 'community networks' to see whether the
internet is strengthening or weakening 'local community' in a Toronto or
Telaviv suburb, and so on. These two metaphors turn up all the time, often in
combination. 

The point I am making is that this obsession with community and network
distracts us from the myriad other ways in which people can relate to one
another, e.g. through clubs, residents' associations, gangs, clans, cohorts,
churches, mosques, schools, colleges, peer groups, age-sets, action sets,
fields of practice, organisations, und und und. I am suggesting that we go
into local settings as internet researchers (and indeed, I would add, as
activists) with an open mind as to which of these social formations will turn
out to be the more significant or influential ones in that locale. Only local
knowledge and empirical work will determine this, not the vague and elastic
rhetoric of community or network. 

John


------ Original Message ------
Received: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:13:56 AM GMT
From: Andreas Schiffler <aschiffler at ferzkopp.net>
To: John Postill <jpostill at usa.net>Cc: idc at mailman.thing.net
Subject: Re: [iDC] PS pre-publication version of Postill 2008

> 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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