The Anthropology of Online Communities

 

In “The Anthropology of Online Communities” by Samuel M. Wilson and Leighton C. Peterson, they discuss the evolution of the Internet-based groups. I really enjoyed reading about their connection between anthropology and these types of communities. Wilson and Peterson state,

Indeed, anthropology is uniquely suited for the study of socioculturally situated online communication within a rapidly changing context. Anthropological methodologies enable the investigation of cross-cultural, multileveled, and multi-sited phenomena; emerging constructions of individual and collective identity; and the culturally embedded nature of emerging communicative and social practices. (450)

I completely agree with them that anthropology is perfect for the study of this style of communication because in one way, a person can consider the Internet just another source for analysis. Just like how an anthropologist can visit another country, an anthropologist can visit a website. The discrepancy though has to do with interaction. Instead of being face-to-face, one is using a virtual interface, which acts like a whole different dimension.

Specifically with regard to Internet communities, Wilson and Peterson talk about the ongoing debate about whether “computer-mediate communities are real or imagined:”

This debate explored whether these sorts of community are too ephemeral to investigate as communities per se, or whether the nature of the communication medium made them somehow quite different from the face-to-face groupings traditionally thought of as communities. (456)

While Rhinegold thinks that these communities are replacing the “public spaces” where we typically interact, Agre argues “we miss the ways in which real communities of practice employ a whole ecology of media as they think together about the matters that concern them” (456). Since I have grown up during the dawn of this Internet era, I find that the positives far outweigh the negatives in regards to online communities. They allow people thousands of miles away to interact in endless ways. While we may miss some things going on around us in “real life” (the non-Internet world), the technological advances have definitely benefitted us more than they have hurt us.