Bell 2001

Words on a screen are quite capable of ... creating a community from a collection of strangers (Howard Rheingold)

The very term 'community' is entailed in number of complexities, even because of the fact that it feels so commonsensical and commonplace [93] and therefore is used in various contexts and meanings. So it is not only descriptive but also normative and ideological: it carries a lot of baggage with it (Bell and Valentine 1997:93)

• Community is sometimes perceived through the prism of inclusion and exclusion, 'us' and 'them' overlapping of 'communities' on twitter > #edchat & #eltchat
• Also through a perceived threat as illustrated by urban sociology - the notions of
• Gemeinschaft - total community, fully integrated vertically and horizontally, stable, long-lasting, comprised of a dense web of social interaction supported by commonality and mutuality, manifest in shared rituals and symbols, a social contract embedded in place and made durable by face-to-face interactions; traditional community where everyone knows everyone, everyone helps everyone, and the bonds between people are tight and multiple; Gemeinschaft constitutes a romanticised ideal of a community and as such is deeply ingrained in people's minds and so tinged with nostalgia
• Gesellschaft - association, long-established bonds and norms are lost, the social fabric is radically transformed, relationships become shallow and instrumental, the 'community' cannot grow as people are too busy, always on the move, non-committal; the social sphere might be broader but the community is weaker, the relationships are partial and transitory 'there is a great deal of loneliness in the lives of many city dwellers' (Kollock and Smith 1999) 
• 'It might be argued that community has become overwritten by nostalgia, in that the way it is talked about so often focuses on its perceived loss, or decline, or erosion' [94]
• Anderson's 'imagined community' (1983) where the sense of community is closely linked to the use of symbolic resources and devices 'because we can never know or interact with all those others with whom we share national identification, we need 'things' to coalesce a shared sense of identity around - a flag, a national anthem, a set of customs and rituals ('invented traditions') [95]

The existence of such communities fully relies on their members belief in them and maintaining shared practices

Although Andersen was referring to a nation, his framework gives us a useful insight into the communities mechanics - we could assume that all communities are imagined and held together by shared cultural practice rather than just face-to-face interaction. #eltchat could be an example of an imagined community even though many of its members have actually met in real life; it's focused and gathered around elt matters, common objective being CPD, it's an object-oriented network, with the object being teaching/teacher training professions; is 'network' the same as 'community'?

Online: person and object-oriented networks - Engestrom's argument about object-oriented networks being more long-lasting

http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why-some-social-network-services-work-and-others-dont-or-the-case-for-object-centered-sociality.html

'duelling dualists' look at the notion of online community in two ways (Wellman and Gulia 1999)

• utopian: cyberspace re-enchants community (the RL equivalent having undergone corruption and erosion)
• dystopic: online community is damaging RL community (see also: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam) as it encourages a withdrawal from a real life

#eltchat doesn't seem to subscribe to any of these as it appears it embraces the notion of the online activity as positive but certainly not as a replacement for the RL equivalent, for many it's the only possibility of discussing professional matters with like-minded people

Such a debate might be perceived as:

• Manichean - polarised into two completely opposing viewpoints
• Presentist - lacks a sense of the history of community
• Unscholalry - depends laregly on anecdotal evidence and travellers' tales
• Parochial - forces a separation between online and RL life

A more general yet critical approach to the concept of 'community' in late modernity is needed which takes into account broader social, political, economic and cultural transformations such as globalisation. Understanding such processes and how they affect us and the offline communities might be helpful in conceptualising online communities - the internet is an imaginative space to conceptualise the notion of imagined community [96]

• globalisation
• 'a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding' (Waters, 1995) [95]
• a shrinking of the world - 'time-space compression' (Harvey, 1989) and the accompanying 'global flow'

• disembedding
• as a result of globalisation, people, ideas, images, commodities, technologies, money are no longer grounded in one place, but constantly on the move and so become disembedded 
• disembedding allows us to choose our communities 

• detraditionalisation 
• our perception of this reshaping and shrinking > heightened reflexivity - we keep reworking who we are in the face of the global flows and being disembedded, we decide who we are and who we want to be and so start to question what so far has been taken for granted, resulting in detraditionalisation - A CHANCE TO MAKE OVER THE SOCIAL FABRIC ANEW AND TO IMAGINE NEW FORMS OF COMMUNITY [96]
• detraditionalisation frees us from old obligations and let us give community a postmodern make-over 
• reflexivity allows us to think about who we are and who we want to be 

Criticism of the above:

• makes us 'schizophrenic' and gives us a 'depthless' existence (Jameson 1991)
• 'uncertainisation' actually strengthens our need of belonging so the notion of an 'ideal' community is something we keep craving for
• in fact, the need becomes essentialised and as a result the community becomes theorised as a 'natural' manifestation of an 'innate' human desire for association and identification
• intense urbanisation: cities resemble 'alien perpendicular tangles' bomb sites and fear and loathing stalk the streets'

Are these transformations in community a good or a bad thing?

Are virtual communities ameliorating or exacerbating these transformations in the forms and meanings of community? [97]

Internet is a safe and ideal site to play and belong - does that help or does that hinder?

Are online communities just groups, pale equivalents of their offline counterparts or could they support and intensify the real life activity? it would be interesting to know how the participants perceive the online community in relation to their offline professional communities? is the online just an extension? is it the foundation? or is it a parallel platform?

According to HOWARD RHEINGOLD, virtual community is a bit like a neighbourhood pub or coffee shop full of spirit of mutuality where sophisticated topics are raised on a par with flirting and idle talk. This is done with words on computer screens with bodies left behind, and time and location being rendered unimportant (see the quote at the top) having some links with the community this one seems so true! but the motivation seems different

• People do it because of 'the hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of trad communities around the world (Rheingold 1999: 418) plus human ingenuity - 'lost' communities are rebuilt, re-integrated in cyberspace
• Online communities are therefore thought of here as growing 'organically' to fill the space left by the demise of 'trad' communities [99]
• Online community-formation occurs 'when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace' (1999:413 on 99) - cyberspace as a petri dish and online communities seen as microorganisms creating colonies 
• Online community: complex and heterogeneous? Customised neighbourhood? 'places' you regularly go to which make a mosaic of your interests, intersecting with the interests of fellow members - possibilities of finding likeminds in cyberspace are bigger than through other media [1999:423 - 99] 
• The possibility of community arises from shared interests - these then catalyse the social bonds that extend beyond the narrow focus of those interests [100]

A sense of community develops from:

• shared social code (netiquette)
• reciprocity (knowledge potlatching)

Do the following make me part of a community? when thinking of all the English teachers in the world, do they form a community?

• my identity is institutionalised/formalised (qualifications)
• sharing part of my identity (ELT professional)
• identity-sharing can be deepened by association membership, belonging to a SIG, going to conferences
• professional friendships
• a shared set of knowledge, sometimes expertise
• a set of social conventions, formalised and tacit
• a broad reciprocity - generally speaking teachers like sharing

What makes a community a community? when looking at the following criteria, #eltchat seems to be a community

• Is not only task oriented but also social
• It stimulates sufficient interaction to develop 'group-specific meanings'
• It cannot be too divided or divisive to coalesce
• 'technology is society made more durable' (Latour, 1991 on 101) this refers broadly to the material traces left by social interaction (texts, tools, etc) that carry the society beyond face-to-face [102] the texts constitute the shared space of community 'stable patterns of social meanings, manifested through a group's on-going discourse, ... Enable participants to imagine themselves part of a community [Baym 1998:62 on 102] it's certainly made durable with the record of tweets and summaries kept in a space different from the volatile venue where the chat itself takes place

What are the social codes developed within online communities? The ways in which members of communities establish group norms and find ways to put these in place?

What are the limits of the community?

What are the modes of social control, e.g. Restricting the rights, public shaming, blocking, registering identities, establishing frameworks for mediation, supervising?

Such acts might turn the database into a society as in the case of the online rape [103] but they might be perceived as harmful to the fabric of the community

Compartmentalisation that is producing a portfolio of singularities, fracturing oneself into multiple online selves 'it has been all too easy for virtual communities to encourage multiplicity but not coherence' stands in the way of community building by producing rigid online identities, which makes conflict-resolution and accommodation difficult.

Or does the technology merely give us a silicon-induced illusion of community? [102]

The 'aura' of cybertechnology might in fact be the cement that binds these communities together [102]

Some technologies could be said to be collectivising while others like cars 'metal cocoons' individuating. Internet techs? Either way possibly? Within internet techs, Twitter? Can it be both? Would it be possible for Twitter to be individuating - would it be possible for an individual to post tweets for themselves, not following anybody and blocking potential followers? Would Twitter exercise some sort of control over such a person?

Or maybe in an online community participants imagine themselves as a community? A will-to-community which becomes more apparent under a collective threat?

Maybe the 'ambient fear' of the death of community is the threat that prompts defensive communo-genesis in cyberspace? [102]

Criticism

• Virtual communities are situated in the context of the new cultural and political geographies of our time
• Virtual reality as an alternative reality in a world gone wrong
• Techno-sociality as the basis for developing new and compensatory forms of community and conviviality
• When looked at in such terms, online community becomes a lost object, longed for and nostalgised  - an ideal community, a gemeinschaft - this freezes history, an alternative to society
• 'a domain of order, refuge, withdrawal' 'a retreat from the world' 'bunkering in' [105] from the contamination of pluralism found in the RL city 'being sick of others' and otherness? 'sheltering the beleaguered self in a techno-bubble' 'being digital without being human' 'electronic communication without social contact' > virtual life is regressive, infantile, Edenic

Membership of online community is elective and selective as is withdrawal

'cyberspace community is self-selecting; it is contingent and transitory, depending on a shared interest of those with the attention-span of a thirty-second soundbite' [Sardar 2001: 744 - 105]

Solipsistic and self-fulfilling community - a form of power in the hands of community members

Community ideal online - why do we give up on face-to-face interaction?

There is always something lacking in the online equivalent of the interaction - maybe this is what feeds the longing for the lost object?

Fetishisation of community? Is it always a good thing? #eltchat is probably perceived as something positive, judging from the profuse thanks at the end for links and judging from the numbers attending each of the chats but the community does not seem to be fetishised 

Gemeinschaften sometimes portrayed as strong ties with small minds, community spirit plus oppressive regulation, safety plus surveillance, if you fit in, it's fine, but if you don, they're exclusive and unconfortable (issue of otherness - outcasts migrating to the city)

The notion of Bund, a communion (Hetherington, 1998) as the term community is too vague, and inaccurate in its association with the organic, traditional and ascriptive ideas of a past way of life - Bund a new way of thinking about online get-togethers?

Bund - a place for the expression of enthusiasms, of ferment, of unusual doings' (Freund, 1978, in Hetherington 1998:88) an elective grouping, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity, sharing a strong sense of belonging; charismatic governance which might mean a charismatic leader but also collective charisma 'terms like energy and commitment describing characteristics that all members are expected to exhibit, are the means by which this generalised charisma is likely to be expressed' Hetherington, 1998: 93 TECHNO-CHARISMA - the aura of new technologies that lends them a charismatic appeal [107] like this definition and it seems like #eltchat could be described as one of them

Online life = city life = living 'in the heart of densely populated, heterogeneous, physically safe, big cities (Wellman and Gulia 1999: 172)

Joining an online community is described as easy - but certainly there are various social and cultural barriers

Can the community cope with the 'barbarian hordes' of the undesirable others?

Online community membership as self-serving - the benefits of membership are often described in terms of the individual member's quality of life rather than in the quality of relationships between subjects [109]

Community rewritten as 'reciprocal alterity' or 'a freely constituted ethical association founded in the indirect absolute recognition of all by each' Gorman 2000: 225 on 110

Cohesion within the community is therefore sustained by bounding-out other communities or individuals although there are overlaps bn communities embodied in the mosaic of groups any member belongs to. Cross-posting (cross-hashtagging?) a productive cross-fertilisation process? an example post from #edchat was found useful in #eltchat