Amy's Comments

Laumann, E.O., Galaskiewicz, J., and Marsden, P.V. (1978). Community structure as interorganizational linkages, Annual Review of Sociology, 4, 455-484.

Like the Monge and Contractor book, this article has a lot of valuable information for communications scholars. It provides a nice, succinct review of the researcher literature in three main areas: the structure of interorganizational networks, the processes within networks, and the relation between organizations and individuals and groups. For me in my own work, I began to wonder if resource-dependency theory could be useful for me. Can we apply this in an individual sense? In today’s wired world, people have more freedom to connect with information from a variety of sources. Do we choose to form relationships with those individuals/organizations, etc. through the Internet that provide us access to resources critical to our goals?

Friedland, L. (2001). Communication, Community, and Democracy: Toward a theory of the communicatively integrated community. Communication Research, 28 (4), 358-391.

This article was the first to really begin to show me how I might look at data on multiple levels. I’ll get to this in a minute, but first I have to say that I was stunned to not see the word “media” explicitly mentioned in the initial discussion of public sphere. How else can public agendas “be publicized and monitored over time,” than via the media? I assume that media was implied in the discussion of public sphere, though the word never appeared, that I noticed, until six pages in. I thought that was interesting. However, that is not my main point here.

I have some reservations about whether or not personal communities, aided through technology, do NOT sustain the kinds of social relations necessary to support public and civic life (page 366). I’ve seen individual cases where civic engagement is furthered by the technologically-enhanced personal nature of communities. What about blogs, listservs, and web casts? Don’t these things help people make personal communities, that are not geographically based, but still connect them to the politics of the region of greatest interest to them? I know of people who view web casts from the Wisconsin legislature, though they are currently not residents of the state. They debate and discuss these issues with others. So, they are civically engaged, I think. They are maintaining strong connections to the politics of the region most important to them, as they plan to return to the state in the future.

I did find the discussion centered around Table 3 very useful. I may try to look at my own project data in this context—explore it from the system through micro levels. How many different LEVELS do my subjects address through their media choices?

Kim, Y.C. and Ball-Rokeach, S.J. Civic Engagement from a communication infrastructure perspective.

This paper lays out well the concept of “community communication infrastructure” and its importance to civic engagement. Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) “differentiates local communities in terms of whether they have communication resources that can be activated to construct community, thereby enabling collective action for common purpose” (3). The authors argue that storytelling is a vital communication process in the civic engagement arena. They further argue that we are seeing neither a decline nor a reconstruction of civil society. Rather, according to the authors, some communities have strong infrastructures for civic engagement, and others have weak ones. Neighborhood storytelling is important in the process because promotes communication among residents on issues of local importance.

This article was helpful to me primarily because it served as a great example of how a study may be designed to look at communication networks at multiple levels. I appreciated the calculation of ICSN. However, there are a few technical questions that would be helpful to have answered: What sort of sample size is necessary for this calculation to work? How are each of the three elements (connection to local media, intensity of interpersonal neighborhood storytelling and connection to community organizations) measured and scored? What did the survey tool look like? What were the reliability/validity measures? We need this level of detail if we are to use this structure in our own research… Based on this paper, I wish I had asked my questions differently in my own survey!