In
“The Anthropology of Online Communities,” Samuel Wilson and Leighton Peterson
discuss the evolution of the Internet-based groups. Furthermore, the talk about how anthropology is positioned
to analyze the changes in community, culture and human interactions that result
from the existence of cyberspace.
While I found this article to be slightly outdated (which is acceptable
give that it is a response to the internet from 2002 and the internet has
changed drastically since then), I thought that the authors raised two
interesting points.
First,
they mention that in the early days of the Internet, it was believe that
cyberspace “would enable the rapid and fundamental transformation of social and
political orders” (page 450). This
change would then “inform and empower individuals worldwide, while subverting
existing power structures, may underestimate the power of states to control
information access” (page 451-452).
However, Wilson and Peterson accept this position only concerning small
online groups, instead holding that powerful groups already existing in the
real world would prevent such subversion of the existing systems and society
structures. I think that Wilson
and Peterson have been shown correct.
As I mentioned in a previous post, countries and even corporations have
a great amount of influence on the information available to people via the Internet. In many countries, information is
highly controlled. Furthermore,
private companies, such as Google, traffic information. They also withhold it from individuals
they do not wish to inform. Thus,
the information superhighway exists, but not all the lanes are open to all
travelers.
Second,
Wilson and Peterson discuss the idea of community, writing:
“The idea that a community was defined
by face-to-face interaction was effectively challenged long ago by scholars of
the development of nationalism (Anderson 1983) and transnationalism (Basch et
al. 1994, Hannerz 1996). An online/offline conceptual dichotomy [for example Castells’
(1996) “network society”] is also counter to the direction taken within recent
anthropology, which acknowledges the multiple identities and negotiated roles
individuals have within different sociopolitical and cultural contexts. We are not
suggesting that this point has been completely overlooked in Internet research,
as scholars continue to research the development of online communities within
the context of geographical communities (Agre & Schuler 1997, Hamman 2000).
Specific case studies such as Kuwaiti women’s uses of the Internet for
political action
(Wheeler
2001), American teenage dating practices in chat rooms (Clark 1998), and a
study of the norms and practices of community maintenance in an online lesbian
cafe (Correll 1995) illustrate how offline social roles and existing cultural ideologies
are played out, and sometimes exaggerated, in online communication” (page 456).
What
is interesting about communication online is that, in my opinion, I believe
that it has changed since the time this article was written. Wilson and
Peterson discuss the existence of chat rooms and communities that exist without
face-to-face communication.
However, I think modern social media reflects less the replacement of
face-to-face communication. It
seems that most social media now exists to inform others of what individuals
are thinking rather than to stand in for conversation. This still leads to the creation of
online communities, but these exist less in cyberspace than previously. It seems that the Internet now expands
physical communities to cyberspace, changing what is usually communicated and
how communication within already existing groups takes place.
Of
course, expanding on this last point, the expansion of real community online
and the change in communication greatly affects what is said between
individuals. An example would be
cyberbullying. In the real world
such extreme bullying is less like likely, but now it exists online. Yet, the bullying is grounded in the
real world, just strengthened and untethered in cyberspace.
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