LectureVirtual Communities

This week

Thinking-through 1.Marshall McLuhan's global village thesis, 2.Virtual communities3.Networks

Aims of lecture

• To develop an understanding of virtual communities, global village thesis and notions of the network

Reading for this week

• Reading and viewing the Global Village

• Marshall McLuhan's 'Global Village‘ By Benjamin Symes• Danah Boyd, (2007)

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace • Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun (2006) New Media/Old

Media (London & New York: Routledge, pp. 375-397 (italics added)• Nicholas Carr’s controversial The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

published in Wired

Part One: The global village, virtual

communities, and network fever

Decoding Google Images

Decoding the global village

Decoding the global village

Decoding the global village

Decoding the global village

The Global Village Thesis

• A rosy picture?• A more realistic view

from McLuhan?

• See also McLuhan’s CBS interview with McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

• “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.”

• “During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.”

• “Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.” McLuhan, 1964 p. 16

What does McLuhan mean?• "All media are extensions of

some human faculty- psychic or physical" The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 26

• “…the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system"The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 31-40

• Media as an extension of “man”

Media: as an extension

Sending messages corresponding to your five senses

SightHearingTouchSmellTaste

central nervous system

Network Communicationnew cognitive and sensory connections

What kind of brain is the Web giving us?

• “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

Read Wired article adapted from Nicholas Carr, (2010) The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, W.W. Norton and Company

The Academic Debate:Back in the 1990s

• Whereas we now commonly refer to social networks like Facebook and MySpace back in the 1990s academics questioned the notion of a virtual community

Early Communities

• Usenet – 1979-80 – newsgroups– Duke University in US

• WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) 1985 – BBS, ISP and Web-based

Real versus Virtual meatspace versus virtualspace

Real versus Virtual meatspace versus virtualspace

• Reality• fixed• permanent• immovable • not artificial • not fraudulent• not illusory

• Virtuality• hypothetical • artificial • experienced through

sensory stimuli

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

So what is a community?

So what is a community? • Unified body of

individuals

• The local community• The community as a

whole• The international

community • The academic community• Virtual community

• An interacting population of various kinds of individuals in a common location

• Munis = bound together

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm

Can communities exist online?

• Whether or not people can share ‘community’ online was hotly contested

The debate back in the 1990s…‘In two years, there will be more network users than residents of any state in the United States. In five years there will be more network users than citizens of any single country except India or China. What will happen when McLuhan's global village becomes one of the largest countries in the world? Using two-way communications, not broadcast? And crossing boundaries of space, time, and politics?’ (Rheingold in 1993)

Check and see http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Download and read ‘Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace’:

http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/

• Howard Rheingold, 1993 The Virtual Community

• ‘People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.’

• argue • conduct commerce • exchange knowledge• brainstorm

• gossip • flirt• fall in love• play games• create a little high art and a lot

of idle talk

Optimists ‘Virtual Communities’

Optimists ‘Virtual Communities’

• Rheingold refers to computer mediated spaces

• ‘online brain trusts’

• ‘computer-assisted groupminds’

• Community as – Extension of the

nervous system (McLuhan)

– Collective Intelligence (Levy)

Pessimists ‘Virtual Communities’

• Clifford Stoll, 1995. Silicon Snake Oil

• ‘What’s missing from this ersatz (imitation, substitute) neighbourhood?’

• feeling of permanence • a sense belonging• a sense of location

• ‘Gone is the very essence of a neighbourhood’

• friendly relations • a sense of ‘being’

The Big Guns from Sociologyand the problem

with a sense of ‘being’

• Shared proximity or social presence

• The social presence or the sense of ‘otherness’ Anthony Giddens, 1995

• No evidence of meaningful sense of reciprocal responsibility or mutual obligation Neil Postman, 1993

The Virtual as Escapism?

• Optimists…

• Virtual communities - a utopian ‘escape’ or

‘release’ us from a world that…

• ‘…seems to get more complex and more

overwhelming [and] ever more scary’

(Esther Dyson, 1997 pp. 31-33)

• Pessimists…

• The ‘death of distance’ is a crisis…

(Robins & Webster 1999 pp. 238-260)

• The Global Village is a Dystopia

Need to…• ‘relocate virtual culture

in the real world’ (Kevin Robins in Dovey, 1996 p. 26)

In the 21st century networks surround us

• I’m getting bored with Facebook• http://www.rebelvirals.com/high/index.html#/rage-

against-the-mundane/

Recent debate

• More recently academics have moved on from questions about

– Real versus Virtual• and

– Can community exist online?

Facebook Politics

Social Network Research

• Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

• Danah Boyd, June 24, 2007

• http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

Facebook and MySpace

• "hegemonic teens“

• The dominant influence

• Meaning teens under the dominant influence

• “subaltern teens“

• Outside the dominant influence

• Alternatives

Social Space is Network Space

Network FeverMark Wigley

Network Fever

• ‘We are constantly surrounded by talk of networks. Every third message, article, and advertisement seems to be about one network or another. We are surrounded, that is, by talk on networks about networks.’

• Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun, in New Media/Old Media (London & New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 375-397 (italics added)

Network Fever

• Computer• Television• Telephone• Airline • Radio• Beeper• Bank • [Social network]• [Terror network]

Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun, in New Media/Old Media (London & New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 375-397

Scales of NetworksGlobal (wide area)National Infra (wireless)Local AreaHome (residential)Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun, in New Media/Old

Media (London & New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 375-397

Modes of NetworkInternetWebWirelessMobileOpticalGPS – [Global

Positioning System]

Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun, in New Media/Old Media (London & New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 375-397

GPS networks allow interactive mediascapes

Network Space

•‘Space itself can only be seen when caught in the net’ Mark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun, in New Media/Old Media (London & New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 375-397

Network Fever• ‘In celebrating this

new kind of territory, we recast questions of individual identity in terms of unimaginable levels of connectivity, ignoring the equally dramatic rise of new forms of inaccessibility’

inaccessibility

New Network Discourse• Openness• Democracy• Free exchange• Speed

Dominates over that of

• Control• Surveillance• Blockage• CrimeMark Wigley “Network Fever” in Wendy Chun, in New Media/Old Media

(London & New York: Routledge, 2006) pp. 375-397

Coming WeeksCommunication Models

InteractivityConvergence

Hypertext