On field theory...

The field theory, as originally used by psychologists, was part of the Gestalt movement which was an (mainly European) attempt to counter the (mainly American...) mainstream of the ever micro and fragmentized approaches of behaviorism. It applied a holistic and dynamic concept on how people perceive the world. And just alike, Burdieu uses his 'field' concept s to explain specific social patterns that is to be explored in a whole and as an dynamic setting, more as a part of an open system. Then, what are the fields made of? Take this week's reading, substitute all the words 'field' with '(social) network' and it makes perfect sense. Taking into account Burdieu's argument that dynamics of various forces are in play, it was not surprising that the concept of 'field with in field' has similiarities with Parsons' 'AGIL within AGIL'. And then again, such reoccuring patterns were also part of the fractal designs in chaos theory to explain the natural settings of an ecology, as read from previous week's reading by Capra. A beautiful interconnection.

I think it is an important step to get into the big question for this class this semester, namely the media ecology, since this reading deals with the production of news; and that news is also produced in a socially networked manner with capital and habitus in complex interplay. One question I would like to think on is how these patterns can be applied to the people in general, as it becomes clear that individuals have more and more power to produce and distribute "news" with the help of advanced online technologies such as the Internet. "Every citizen is a journalist", as the famous headphrase of Ohmynews.com goes. It should be worth to compare that pattern with the 'professional' journalism pattern, if we want to see the overall dynamics of what constitutes today's news sphere as experienced by the individual.

Amy's Comments on Bourdieu

Benson, R. and Neveu, E. (2005). Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Polity Press: Cambridge, England.

I’ve really enjoyed this book so far (I do have one chapter left to read)! This book expands on Bourdieu’s concept of field theory as it relates to journalism—the structure of the relationships among the actors of journalism (journalists, editors, readers/viewers) and other fields (politics, economy, religion, etc.). It’s essentially a structural ecology of journalism that takes into consideration (as Monge and Contractor would like) the entire nature of the public sphere—from the internal structure of individual newsrooms (micro level) to journalism’s relationship to other fields (macro level). I think a real strength to this book are in some of the supporting chapters. We are given very concrete examples of HOW to apply this concept to a research question (whether it be an account of the development of youth activism in journalism or a comparison of the journalistic practice in different countries. What comes to the fore for me is the how field theory looks for patterns and consistency but also allows for the fact that media messages do not impact every person in the same way at the same time.

Question: Does field theory sufficiently account for (all?) macro and micro level factors?

Levels.

(Finished my readings late...)

Lew's piece suggests that communities are building blocks for democracy, and communication is the tool that holds them together, and the Metamorphosis project piece that "storytelling community resources" is what is being communicated. And Laumann et al. peice fits in nicely in looking into how community faciliates interorganizational networks; If we consider the various levels, we could say that such communities again form networks that are included in a broader level of community, thus giving it a recurring pattern. Combined, those theories build a solid base to build discussions on.

One thing I would like to add to that is the concept of individual capacity, or to go in accord to Lew's accounts, "intra-personal level". An individual has only a limited capacity to invest into matters that is not of immediate self-interest, namely making-a-living. I always liked the concept of Putnam's social capital because it introduced a material(capitalistic?) sense to one's social activities; and I think this approach could also be applied to democracy, or a 'democratic/civic capital'. It is not practical for most people to spend too much of their resources - time, money, motivation and brain cells - evenly into all levels of community from micro to the system level. Sometimes one invests too much of his focus and interest on national news and neglects what's going on in the neighborhood; On the other hand, others are only concerned with their neighborhood and don't care about the larger dimensions of democracy. And it functions as the motivator or filter for those individuals to engage/disengage from specific levels of communicative action. Then, the question is how do individuals form such allocation strategies; Of course I would suggest communication on various levels as the key factor, as to build a cycling/feedbacking mechanism.

PS. I don't fully agree on Lew's quote of Hirschman ("They are communities of exit, because it is easiest for those who are dissatisfied(or simply bored) to leave rather than excercise their voice for change") to specify the limits of Internet. It is true that disconnecting from a webchat forum is easier than moving out of your residental neighborhood. But there are clearly instances where a strong communal bond arises from sharing common interests online; I think it is not a matter of whether it's online or offline, but how fully/broadly they engage in communicative action.

Week 10 reading: Communication constitutes community!

Community tends to be usually defined in contrastable ways like geographical vs. non-geographical or normative vs. instrumental. Lauman et al have something common with Monge and Contractor’s assumption of organizational coevolution for their explanation of community structure. Lauman et al try to understand community as interorganizational concept, rather than traditional concept. In other words, communities work as subsystems. Thus, community needs to transform or coevolute as the environment changes. Many social network theories such as resource dependency, public goods and social capital explain that how community as interorganizational entity tries to adjust itself to the environment.

On the other hand, Kim and Ball-Rokeach, and Friedland demonstrate that communication, or communicative action, is the key element to construct community. In fact, social structure can be analyzed in terms of the types of human communication and communication media. Even though Habermas’ theory of communicative action is quite normative, the concept of communicative action serves as a critical tool to analyze community structure as interogranizational entity. As Kim and Ball-Rokeach point out, communicative action is rationale discourse. However, community formation necessarily involves in emotional and affectional aspects of human actions and interactions. Therefore, the question is how we can incorporate human beings’ non-rational, emotional, affectional aspect of action and interaction into the formation processes of “communicatively integrated community.”

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!

week9 RN: The web of life of communication networks

Finished the last chapters of Monge & Contractor, and again felt the need to go back over the skipped chapters on math models... :) A good part of inspiration was presented where they were discussing about the future network forms of organizing, referring to examples such as open source and p2p. Though the discussion was a little too optimistic/naive in my perpective, it gave me a good direction on what aspects to see in dealing with those subjects. Also liked the part that "minor changes can have dramatic changes in the global structure of the network"; however, I got really curious on what those changes will be like. Given that the mission or the role of the organization in a greater network requires some greater forces to change, is it that individual nodes change but will be restored to its former structure? or rather, is the structure itself often very prone to change as result of the changing of nodes? In other words, how strong is the 'pattern' of the network in accordance with the individual nodes, under what conditions. Such questions come into my mind because I am interested in how to implement findings on the roles and principles of network structure to build reform strategies for already existing organizations; for example, how to change a network structure to balance the organizational democracy vs efficiency debate in online journalism groups. Or even of greater scales of democracy, when history has often proved that you can't gain democracy simply by beheading the dictator.

On the other hand, Capra's was a more 'warm' read, emphasizing how life itself is a function of an open network that includes the whole environment. Chaos thery is nothing new by now since Jurassic Park, but it was helpful to see how such views arose into the next paradigm. And I can say, that the process itself had a very 'ecological' nature, deriving from various influences and building up into a networked way of understanding(which unwittingly is the meaning of 'Tao', a keyword his previous book talked about). However, in matter of communication, or narrowly speaking 'media', I still need to think about how the communication system becomes an self-organizing ecology.

Week 9 reading note-Yong Jun

I think that Monge and Contractor’s coevolution theory and Capra’s ecophilosophical approach have something common with the efforts to understand complexity in the world, which has been emerging all over human and natural environments. Human actions and interactions are no longer understood merely based on their attributes. They are connected not in a linear fashion but in complex networks. In addition, natural phenomena also occur in the form of complex networks of relationships. Moreover, both human and nature are deeply connected and influence each other. Therefore, I think that the ideas of coevoluation and ecosophy have a tremendous potential to rethink our life and the world as a whole in a critical and reflexive way. If we can accept this epistemology, or worldview, we can reach the agreement of idealistic cosmopolitan way of life. Then, a possible project could ponder on the way how we create the networks among the world populations for coevolutionistic coexistence.

Amy's comments

Monge and Contractor

In these two chapters, Monge and Contractor further their exploration into the social mechanisms that influence why people (or peoples) create, reshape, drop, (etc.) links within their organizational networks. Throughout the book, the authors have done a fabulous job in outlining various types of theories we may use to answer this question… theories of self interest, collective action, exchange, homophily, co-evolution and others. However, I still can’t help feeling cheated. I get the fact that multiple actors/influences are at play at any given time and that looking at only one aspect of the environment leads to an incomplete representation. People change along with others in their network. One person’s actions/decisions, etc. alter the environment as a whole. At the same time other people’s changes alter the network that we are in turn responding to. This isn’t simply telling us to conduct our analysis at multiple levels is it? I know that already. It’s the same battle we wage with quantitative versus qualitative analysis… both have advantages and disadvantages (which is why I like mixed methodologies so much). You can’t argue with the authors’ claim that it’s better or more complete to conduct research at multiple levels of analysis. Of course it is. But HOW DO WE DO IT? I feel like I got invited to the ball, but when I got there realized that no one else had shown up. It was a big letdown.

Fritjof Capra: The Web of Life

This book provides a nice complement to what we’ve been reading so far. Capra looks at the ecology of living systems. It’s reassuring to see that what we have come to accept in the hard sciences, like physics, is also reinforced in what we “soft science” people have been talking about for so long. He reinforces the existence of interrelationships among systems of living things. The world is a web of relationships—the social, chemical, psychological, cultural, etc. aspects of our lives are all interconnected with those same aspects of everyone else’s life. I still wonder: What is the perception of this in the scientific community?

Week8...

There are a lot of network theories summarized in this week's reading, that are somewhat social psychology oriented rather than sociology. I felt it as a kind of turnpike for this course. I took particular interest in the cognitive approaches, which basically emphasize how people make sense of such structures. Being from an Asian culture where there is actually a stronger sense of social connectedness than the "west", it interests me how social networks are held together by the viewpoints of the 'nodes'. Of course it happens that in many cases, the cognized network by an individual in it does not fully correpond to the actual structure (e.g. exaggerated feeling of having democracy, feeling more socially active than one actually is, etc), and making people recognize those differences can function as an motivation for change. I like the problem settings of Gramsciin which he asks why a revolution didn't occur, and eventually invented the concept of hegemony; Implemeting theories of cognitive social structures, even (quantitavely?) observable data could be considered. Focusing on communication networks, it could be also helpful in finding out how Internet-based networks such the "blogosphere" is actually being perceived as an tool for bringing about changes. However the tricky thing is, that to achive those goals the comparison BETWEEN the cogized network of each individuals(nodes) and the actual structure of the network must be conducted. But in many cases, the non-surface networks can be explored only through the information reported by the nodes themselves, and then it would get mixed up. Methodological questions on how to obtain observational data is still giving me headaches(and probably will for the rest of my academic life, I guess).

Amy's comments

Sorry, but I can't get my weekly comments to show up on my personal class blog. Here they are:

Monge, P. and Contractor, N. (2003). Theories of Communication Networks. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

It comes as no surprise to realize that the chapters for this week also contain an incredible amount of valuable information. There are really great summaries here on embededness, (mutual and reciprocal relationships), collective action theories, contagion theories (how attitudes and behaviors are dissemination through a network), semantic theories, transactive memory theory, exchange theory, and, of particular interest to me in my own work, homophily. Seeing as how I study the communications among individuals with emotional disorders, I like the idea of homophily, that we select individuals for our networks who are similar. This reduces the psychological discomfort that can arise form emotional or cognitive inconsistency. I also find in my work studying how these individuals use the Internet, that the dual effects hypothesis may be very useful. This argues that he internet can simultaneously enlarge and shrink communication networks. The notion that social networks play a buffering role in the effects of stress on mental well being will also be particularly useful for me.

Question: As I commented last week, I am very intrigued by the authors’ premise. I like the idea of being able to study a communications network in its entirety, rather than its tiny separate pieces. As a “numbers geek” I find some comfort in statistics amid the confusion. I like being able to generalize out from one specific type of situation to larger patterns of networks. However, I’m still not clear on exactly how we do this. Where is our data coming from, and how to we compute it?