RN_Week4: Place. conformity and borders.

The readings in week4 are about "place". It wouldn't be wise to simply ask whether the concept of place still counts; If community consists of a set of actions and norms, those actions still take place in a material world made of time and space, with norm that reflect them. Molotch, Freudenberg & Paulsen's study is an example of how actions accumulate to form specific characteristics of places. Even in a person-to-person community as described by Wellman it is not that the concept of place is gone or meaningless, but that layers of place utilization - e.g. personalized vs traditional - are colliding to create new meanings of interaction, which is brilliantly portrayed with the example of the cellphone-talking man.

The concept of place has its meaning as a space with conformity: a sector of space with specific characteristics, a node, an unit, a common ground. And those factors imply almost direct connections to our class theme 'community'. However, I can't stop asking that there is the other side of the coin: some meanings of places are formed by building borders, that is differentiating and separating itself from others. Sometimes the border is strong, sometimes it's rather ambiguous, but in many cases quite concretely observable. For example, a place of strong community-ness asset such as ghettos take on their meaning because the place right outside of their specific borders does not share their values. I wonder what further discussions on place have been done regarding how such borders are formed and/or dissolved.


PS. The same applies for the concept of community as well. Wellman set the four the functions of a community as "sociability, support, information a sense of belonging and social identity". If we turn it other way around, it means that the world outside of that community will NOT give you those privileges - at least, not with the same characteristics. Maybe this can be further discussed in another session.

Why place?

This week reading seems to ask us whether place is really meaningless or not in terms of creating and maintaining community in this networked society made by individual links. As the Chicago School noticed, the urbanization process has been producing serious social changes. From individual life to societal institutions, it has given a profound impact on society as a whole. In addition, communication technologies have been also accelerating social changes. Especially, the development of transportation and communication media helps individuals overcome the limits of communication due to space and time. At the same time, those external impacts have been finally reorganizing individual and collective life in contemporary society to the extent that individuals are able to organize groups regardless of the limitation of space. Under this complex social change, many are skeptical about the role of place for communal life. However, let us think over the fundamental driving force of this drastic social change. Even all sorts of high-tech communication media, which enable us to communicate without the limitation of time and space, are produced in specific places by capitalists’ calculation of cost-benefit.

I think, as Molotch et al. and Gieryn claim, that place is still important to shape the characteristics of collective life. Furthermore, it significantly affects to create community nowadays. However, I don’t want to insist the importance of place for community with only political economic concern and interactive impact of physical environment settings. Most of all, I’d like to emphasize the fact that we are still living on the coordinate of time and space in this post-modern era. We have to arrange our time and move here to there for our everyday life. We are to run into our neighbors whoever we like or not. In the most realistic sense, if we don’t trust neighbors and then don’t interact with one another, the real estate value is more likely to decrease. It affects our personal assets as well as quality of life. (But, you know what? I am living in a student housing.^^) The simple answer is that we have to build community with our neighbors for our quality of life. It is a normative necessity to make “desirable” community in the place where we live.

week 3 reading note

Thanks to Nak-ho, I present my week 3 reading note again.

It seems like Brint’s typology of community was influenced by modernistic perspective to human life. In particular, the notion of “time-space distantiation” seems to affect his distinction between geographic and choice community.

In regard with our last class discussion, I agree with Chris and Nakho about their ideas that there are other types of community, which are composed of marginalized individuals and, then, are not easily classified by modernistic thought of communal life. We must not ignore those communities for our investigation. However, in contemporary societies, many ordinary individuals are still affected by geographic and choice-based communal life. As individual freedom of choice increases, people can easily create community with help of information and communication technologies beyond the limits of space and time. However, as Calhoun points out, we must not dismiss the fact that many social phenomena have been created and driven by cybercapitalism. That is why we can not help giving skeptical eyes on cyber community and paying attention to community of place.

Also, I am curious about whether communal life and collective life are the same. If they are the same, are we seeing that communal, or collective, life is at the opposite end of the continuum between collectivism and individualism? So, can we say that as individualistic life increases in modern society, communal or collectivistic life decreases? In contrast, if they are different, and if the distinction is meaningful, how they differ from each other? If both communal and collective life is composed of social network, what characteristics can differentiate from each other? For this matter, I found that Parsons’ idea is useful. Parsons also based social integration on interactions among individuals. Based on his explanation, I could define that community has a certain value, which is “commitments to a conception of a good type of society” as “the desirable” to society based on consensus, rather “the desired” by individuals according to rational interest. Therefore, community differs from collective life since it implies potential toward public life with the medium of communicative action.

On the other hand, from the two articles about Talcott Parsons, I could understand his theory of social system and his endeavors to create a grand social theory in more detail. My overall impression of Parsons’ theory is that he was very too ambitious, and his intellectual trajectory seemed to change from liberal to conservative especially in terms of ontology even though he actively participated into social issues in behalf of minorities. I don’t think that I am able to criticize his theory of social system in detail, but as for his idea of societal community in global context, I’d like to point out that Parsons was less concerned with revealing the primary driving force of social differentiation from modernity by too much focusing on political and governmental power, and cultural conflicts in contemporary societies. Thus, he seemed to analysis money as communication media, rather than power itself. I think that social differentiation and disintegration also must be understood in terms of political economy, in particular global capitalism. I think that the primary driving force of “reflexive” or “radicalized” modernity is still capitalist.

[RN_Week3] Dynamics of norms

J970Reading response for Week3: What is community? (Cont.)

To further enhance the discussion last week which stated that one of the most important components missing in Brint's category of community is "Norms", this week's reading includes pieces on the functionalist Talcott Parsons. His emphasis is on the power of voluntary will of the individual and the norms of the community; And as Gerhardt summarizes, his latter ideas on social differentiation(the process of modernization) vs integration(the process of societal community) is also a useful framework in looking at how communities are held together.

However, still little is said about how these norms come into place. The norms of a community is not democratically or equally agreed upon by all members; Roles and leaderships do exist, and some in the community have more power over it than others. (Of course it would be confusing to mix the ideals of community - call it 'Gemeinschaftlichkeit' - with the existing forms of grouped people that are largely called communities, but it is clearly the latter that we draw our observations from). Moral consensus is not a fully moral matter, but bears a systemized power structure. The dynamics of community norms should be further thought about, namely the specific structure of how they are formed, agreed upon, and dissolved. I think that if we want to categorize communities of today, it can be a valuable factor.

[About this Blog...]

(Ok, let's see if it works. Yeah, seems to be fine. )

This blog is a "space" for the Fall 2005 semester J970 students at UW-Madison to share their reading comments and other valuable insights with peers. Everyone in the class (including Lew of course) is invited to be authors.

This common blog is for the reading papers only. The field notes, which are basically individual progress, is much better kept on each one's own blog(which you should all have by now, as you are signed up into blogger.com service). Since Blogger.com doesn't support in-blog categories, It's a logical thing to do. However, the link to each member's blog will always be on this page, so you won't have any problem reaching each other.

Of course comments and remarks for each post is desirable, which can be done per "reply comments". One more thing: this blog allows posting of images, but unfortunately no other files such as PDFs, flash movies, AVIs and so on. If you happen to have some that you feel important to share, let me know and I'll find some way.

So, that's it. Let's start off with putting our Week3 stuff online, and keep it here.