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.