pagre@ucla.edu
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
This is a draft. Please do not quote from it.
Version of 10 December 1999.
1800 words.
As networked information technology becomes ubiquitous, we are often compelled to clarify concepts that we have been using uncritically. Observe, for example, the different meanings at play in the phrases "community network" and "network community". "Community network" suggests "given a (geographically localized) community, build a network", and "network community" suggests "given a (globally distributed) network, build a community". Those have been the polarities of popular and professional discourse. In each case the word "community" points to an ideal of overcoming social distance, and in each case the word "network" suggests an instrument for doing so.
"Network" and "community" seem complementary: each is capable of containing the other. Each plays its role in an old story that is central both to American culture and to the tradition of sociology. According to this story, people in preindustrial societies lived their lives in small, intimate communities, these communities were torn apart by the industrial revolution, people in modern societies consequently live isolated and atomized lives, and action is therefore required to recover the intimacy of local solidary communities. This story, as research by sociologists such as Wellman (1999) has shown, is false in most important respects. Communities have always suffered from factions and conflicts that mirror those of the social structure more broadly (1999: 12). People have always traveled great distances and built far-flung networks of kin, trade, and scholarship (1999: 11). Economic and political dealings, no matter how spread out, are still largely embedded in social networks (Granovetter 1992). And modern people have social networks that are no less robust than those of their premodern ancestors (1999: xiii). Much has changed, to be sure. Social networks are more spread out geographically and thus less locally dense (1999: 26-27). The activities of building and maintaining networks are more likely to happen in private spaces and less in public ones (1999: 28-30). But the problems of the new world are hard to parse in terms of such simple contrasts to those of the old.
To bring order to contemporary discussions of these matters, it will help to enumerate the range of meanings that now attach to the words "community" and "network" (for "community", cf. Downing 1999, Jones 1998). I will mention five of each. Geographic communities are localized. Communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) are defined by something -- an interest or identity, perhaps -- that their participants have in common, regardless of their location in space. Thus we speak of "the African-American community", but an occupational or recreational group is a community of practice as well. Third, Wellman (1999: 17-21) suggests that a social network can be understood as a community; this notion, unlike the others, lacks a sense of commonality or boundary. Fourth, a virtual community can be built in an Internet forum (Rheingold 1993), although in practice most virtual communities are embedded in larger communities of practice whose members interact through other media as well. Finally, Anderson (1991) suggests that newspapers and other media can create imagined communities for their readers, and each of the other kinds of community can have an imaginary aspect as well as an aspect of concrete interaction.
The word "network", for its part, can refer to a set of computers communicating by common protocols. It can also refer, as can "community", to a social network. Other meanings are more obscure. For some economists, a network good is a good whose value to a buyer depends in large part on the number of other people who have it (Katz and Shapiro 1994). Telephones are network goods; so are operating systems and fashionable clothes. Other economists speak of the networks of firms whose sprawling alliances enabled them to engage in especially complex production processes (Grabher 1993). Finally, one speaks of broadcast networks, an industry-specific concept that combines both technical and organizational elements.
All of this, both the sociological facts and the array of concepts with which several sorts of social scientists have tried to contend with them, tends to undermine the simple opposition between local and global. Our attention is drawn toward the middle ground, and especially to the ways in which the intrinsic properties of information help to shape the architectures of both social networks and technical networks, and thereby define what community might possibly mean. Let us begin with some of the phenomena that have affected the development of community networks (Freiberger and Swaine 1984: 100ff, Schuler 1996). The earliest community networks considerably predate widespread adoption of the Internet, and numerous such networks predate widespread adoption of the Web. As a result, those early community networks required some customized hardware and much customized software, most of which was overtaken as the Internet spread. In particular, many publicly supported community networks, which offered dial-up service bundled with the rest of their services, found themselves assailed by newly emerging Internet service providers, who thought it unfair to be facing government-subsidized competition. Character-based interfaces were likewise overtaken by graphical interfaces, and custom-built graphical interfaces by the Web. Newer community networks could build their services directly on the Web; older ones had to translate.
The lesson here applies far beyond community networks, and it runs much deeper than the inevitability of obsolescence and the march of progress. In each case, pioneers built heavily bundled services because standardized platforms did not yet exist. Once several such bundles were in use, it became possible to abstract out one element of the bundled functionality. Such standardized platforms are extremely efficient because the costs of developing, producing, acquiring, installing, learning, maintaining, and upgrading them can be distributed across many applications. Bundled services might arise in different industries or localities, but the informational efficiencies -- economies of scale -- of standardized platforms will eventually provide a common denominator for them all. Community networks, like all networked applications, would do well to plan for this dynamic, which takes certain aspects of both power and freedom away from local system-designers, while creating new opportunities as well.
A similar dynamic applies on the level of content. Some information services and discussion topics are truly local in scope, but most are not, and the non-local services and topics will create great pressure to blur the boundaries between the community network and the global network. The point is not that many services and topics are truly global in scope, but rather that the world's innumerable communities of practice cut across the lines of geographic locality at innumerable angles. A network defined in terms of a particular geographic unit, be it a city or county or nation or continent, can only reasonably aspire to serve needs that are defined in the same geographic terms. Content, like architecture, will become stratified in the long run as generalizable components are abstracted out.
This principle does not only apply to network services; it applies to the production of goods and services more generally. When goods and services are produced locally for local consumption, they can only contain a certain amount of knowledge work. As infrastructures and institutions allow production to be organized regionally, then nationally, and then globally, knowledge labor can be ever more finely divided. It becomes possible to make a career by developing and exercising quite specialized intellectual skills, because the intellectual products of those skills will be embodied in goods and services that are consumed by a great many people. Once again, the key is the long-run process of abstracting out a common element from a large number of complex bundles, and then distributing the cost of that element among an even larger number of new and more clearly modularized bundles. The people who make their careers in this fashion necessarily operate on a global stage. Their skills will be unique, or nearly so, and they will only be able to deploy their skills effectively through social networks that are distributed globally.
What, then, of community? Speak of these knowledge workers, Lasch (1996) has spoken harshly and influentially of a "revolt of the elites", as if these global professional networks developed purely through affiliation and choice. Lasch, in fact, contends that the material wealth that these practices bring is morally wrong, and yet he does not contend with their place in the global system of production. Be this as it may, Lasch's reaction does bring home the question of geographic community in a networked world. Computer networks make both possible and necessary the elaboration of communities of practice based in shared interests, so that the fate of geographic community depends on the shared interests that are still defined in geographic terms once the abstracting forces of globalization have taken hold. Surely these geographically shared interests are numerous: environmental pollution, violent crime, services that require physical interaction, recreational activities, and whatever it is that has so far prevented teleconferencing from becoming widespread. It is clear that these issues still strongly shape who lives where, and who lives close to whom. The question, of course, is whether shared interests necessarily imply community in a more substantive sense: either a shared identity or an overlapping set of social networks within which local economic and political activities can be embedded.
This analysis would seem to confirm the conventional idea that the informational effects of globalization threaten the traditional values of community. But the progressive unbundling of community-forming processes also threaten some of the traditional evils of community. Social mobility has traditionally required a vertiginous leap from one social world to another -- one complex of networks, practices, places, identities, and official accreditations to another. The networked world, however, makes it much easier to maintain several identities, and to be involved in several social worlds at once. In particular, computer networks make it especially easy to reach out across the boundaries of distance and social networks to form caucuses: Latino engineers, radical teachers, conservative lawyers, peace-activist physicians, Christian students, and so on. The Internet is one great laboratory of hybrid identity-formation, as unsettling as this will inevitably seem, and we should embrace it for this.
The central tension between the concepts of community and network, perhaps, is that communities are supposed to define us, where networks are not. Communities are supposed to have boundaries and meanings; they are supposed to correlate with languages and identities, and to be the sites of collective cognition and solidary action. The antirationalist traditions of left and right both celebrate them for this reason, and view the boundlessness of networks as disruptive, or at best as a tool for recovering communitarian values. But none of these conceptual associations is quite true. Communities have always been more complicated than that, and it is precisely those intrinsic complexities that networks greatly amplify. The design of community networks can support positive values in this complicated world, but only so long as the designers understand what they are getting into.
REFERENCES
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition, London: Verso, 1991.
John D.H. Downing, Global networks toward new communities, in Jorge Reina Schement, ed, The Promise of Global Networks, Nashville: Institute for Information Studies, 1999.
Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984.
Gernot Grabher, ed, The Embedded Firm: On the Socioeconomics of Industrial Networks, London: Routledge, 1993.
Mark Granovetter, Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness, in Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, eds, The Sociology of Economic Life, Boulder: Westview, 1992.
Steven G. Jones, Information, Internet, and community: Notes toward an understanding of community in the information age, in Steven G. Jones, CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting CMC and Community, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1998. Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro, Systems competition and network effects, Journal of Economic Perspectives 8(2), 1994, pages 93-115.
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, New York: Norton, 1996.
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993.
Douglas Schuler, New Community Networks: Wired for Change, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Barry Wellman, ed, Networks in the Global Village: Life in Contemporary Communities, Boulder: Westview, 1999.