One Last Time

First of all – here is an article about China starting up Myspace. It’s from the Old Grey Lady (term I learned from this class): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/business/worldbusiness/27myspace.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Time to dig into the questions for this class’s last blog post.

Question 1: (without looking at previous definitions) Community is the consensus of two or more people to share accrued social capital with each other. The motives for joining and continuing to be a part of a community are generally self-interested, but as involvement in the community continues this self-interest may eventually become an invested interest in the growth of the community.

Question 2: Of the online websites this course looked at, none trulyfacilitated offline relationships; especially on Second Life there was never really a community built. On Second Life people do not have to invest enough real life social capital to become a member. I think without the connection to everyday life and real-life situations, on-line websites will only be able to impersonate real communities. However, on-line websites that are attempting to become solely on-line communities are still in their infancy. Who knows what will be possible a few years from now.

Question 3: I believe stronger social networking on-line will help burgeoning on-line communities come closer to offline communities. Facebook exemplifies this by moving successful offline communities to a place on-line in which they can further connect. As people move more and more of their lives on-line I think social networking through on-line means will eventually become a crucial way to social network in everyday life, offline. In this way on-line “communities” may in fact become just that – communities.

Also, sorry this wasn’t up sooner – I was unaware of the assignment until class this afternoon. My bad.

That’s all folks – Elizabeth

Myspace Fixes?

In lieu of our conversations last week, I wanted to post a few brainstorming ideas for “fixing” Myspace.

1. create a more effective search engine to enable finding people

2. create better security for users so they don’t feel like personal information can be intruded upon

3. reduce clutter of website by removing excess advertisements, pictures, music, words – Make It Simple

Some important questions I thought we addressed were; is Myspace imploding in upon itself? When you have 130 million people expressing themselves in the same way are you diluting your image? Is Myspace too big to be considered a community?

new definition of community

As Dr. Carroll advised, I am winging this definition and have not yet looked back at my old definition. Not sure how similar they will end up being.

 Community:

A community is something which is built. It has a structure and a purpose. The structure can be anything from an ant hill, to the human brain to slime mold. The purpose of the community is to connect; ants, brain cells and mold spores. Through the connection a system or structure is co-ordinated, and the multitude of individual voices discover a way to become one. There is often a recognizable pattern through which weak ties network and encourage strong ties. Community is a web of activity. It is constantly evolving to better suit the parts which make up the whole.

There are many different kinds of communities, but some fundamental aspects which remain constant are:

1. there is a common interest uniting the parts, whether it be the desire to eat, a religion, or a favorite TV show.
2. it must be made up of more than a couple individuals or individual things (spores, cells).
3. there must be some kind of mutual agreement amongst the parts that it is in fact a community.
4. it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, it must have a starting point, develop and eventually digress into separate parts again, or an entirely new community.

Communities are developed through many different means. It is hard to define a community in a 100% clear-cut way, but there are certainly some commonalities that must be acknowledged before anything is considered a community. These characteristics of a community allow someone to distinguish and identify a community from a group or from an individual.

Second Research Proposal

Three Research Topic Questions: 

1. Does matadortravel.com foster the “community” spirit it emphasizes so much?

2. How do users establish a credible reputation on the website?

3. What does matadortravel.com offer to users to encourage their interest in joining the website, as well as their desire to build up a pyramid of trust with other users?

Communities of One

Hello Class,

Decided to post this article that I had put in the Campus Carrier last week because it dealt with community.

that’s all – elizabeth

 

 

 

With the world’s population at 6.5 billion, and climbing, how do we, as individuals, define community? Where does the individual stop and community begin? I like to think of Berry as a community; I also identify myself as a part of a community whenever I log onto Facebook.

Having the tangible community and network of friends on campus manifests itself very differently from the cyberspace relationships I have through Facebook. Therefore I wonder if identifying both of these groups of people as communities does not in some way jeopardize the significance of the word community. Religious, literary, sports, and economic communities are all developed through the desire to connect on a level outside ourselves. The propensity hunter and gatherers felt hundred of thousands of years ago to build communities forged human civilization in a way that we can identify with today.

Today, American society focuses on the idea of the individual. Has the shifting definition of what constructs a community only taught us to isolate ourselves more?

For example, instead of asking a friend what music they like, we grab their i-pod and look ourselves. Or, we check out the linked i-tunes music profiles to discover new music we might enjoy; on our own time of course. Even more strikingly apparent in the break-down of communities is the way in which many people actively seek to define themselves. A person spends a lot of time updating their profile on Facebook and MySpace instead of establishing their personality with people face to face. I think this is mostly done because it is easier to feel more in control of the image you present to others (whether or not that image is entirely honest).

I do not believe Facebook is entirely negative. It certainly helps manage relationships with people not in everyday contact with you, but it is worrisome to think the Facebook craze may simultaneously allow us to neglect our responsibilities to others around us more easily. Just because something is easier does not make it better. I fear people become too caught up in the communities we build online and ignore the building of stronger inter-personal communities in their everyday lives.

The Facebook group has feigned a sense of community that I find very frustrating at times. Various clubs at Berry (and other schools) formed Facebook groups in order to remain in touch with students who use it as a primary sources of communication. One such club, S.A.V.E. (Students Against Violating the Earth), has 53 Facebook members and approximately only 6 members regularly show up to meetings. The failure of people to maintain commitments to communities outside of the virtual world is something that I think proves a lesser regard for the concept of community. A community is supposed to bring us together, not minimize interaction with one another.

The shrinking of the world due to globalization seems only to have made us cling more strongly to ourselves; in a frenzied attempt to maintain our own identity. I think that in our rush to remain individual we often forget to remember we would not be who we are without the influence of other persons and the structure of the community mentality. Let us not become, as Ray Bradbury hypothesized we would in his novel Fahrenheit 451, caught up in community of the individual so much that we lose sight of the importance of sharing the human experience.

Research Paper Proposal

So, I had really been struggling to decide what website I wanted to use for my directed research study this semester…when low and behold a friend in another class introduced me to a website. She came into class the other day and told me she had something very important for me to do. Then she wrote down this website in my class notes and said I needed to join because she wanted some more friends. I was skeptical at first because I usually don’t enjoy joining random websites on-line, but then I realized it might be an interesting website to research.
The website is matadortravel.com. It was created for people to create blogs for sharing their experiences traveling and to learn about others’ experiences. My friend thought I would have a common interest in the this website because I have, like her, traveled to foreign countries. Upon further investigation I found the website’s mission statement:
“At Matador, we’re interested in what you think is fresh, both while you’re traveling and while you’re at home, in between trips. Below, you’ll find info on cool stuff in far away places and in your own back yard. If you’re plugged into local culture in your city, or you’ve found a gem that we have yet to discover, share it with the Matador community by adding a blog!”

Matador travel offers links to travel websites, google earth, and provides information on travel tips. The website prides itself on being “a hip, new, vibrant community for people interested in travel, music & art, writing & photography, sports, and positive global development.”
The website is a “community” that has grown out of “travel-culture”. People post pictures and connect because of a common interest. I think this site is truly indicative of people’s desire to connect to others about anything. When you travel someplace for a long time it is hard to come back to your family and friends and immediately fit back into your past life. You want to talk about what you did and who you met and what you saw, but usually the people you come back to are tired of hearing about it after a couple weeks.
Last year I studied/traveled abroad in Europe for 6 months. It was an incredible experience and I still often think about what all I saw and did. I am interested in this website for personal reasons as well as research.

What I want to find out:
1. does this website foster the “community” it emphasizes so much?
2. what kind of hierarchy is set up for users?
- have to have traveled
- probably have to have certain monetary status
- age group?
3. does the website alienate people trying to fit back into their own cultures more? or give them an appropriate outlet for sharing their experiences?
4. as with most blogs, I am interested in finding out whether these “communities” are really beneficial and healthy. I have always been anti-blog and had never had one before this class. Are blogs a positive or detrimental part of people’s social lives?

All of this regarding my proposal is vague, but I hope it helps me understand bloggers better, and maybe even learn about some “hip” travel tips (haha).

that’s all folks – elizabeth

excerpt from Matador travel About page:
“Travel is a vehicle for uniting individual voices, minds and ideas. As travelers, we are, in a sense, freelance ambassadors; not only do we return with stories of other cultures and ways of life, but we also share our own culture and ways of life with the people we meet along the way. We at Matador believe this exchange is essential to bringing about positive development in our rapidly changing world.”

p.s. also, how does this website generate revenue? hmmmm

everything is related

In my course “Globalization” I have to read five million articles, and one of them dealt with community. It is an article entitled Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism by Roger Rouse.

Rouse defines community as:

“The abstract expression of an idealized nation-state, it has been used concretely at numerous different levels, from the peasant village to the nation itself. It combines two mian ideas. First, it identifies a dicscriminable population witha single, bounded space – a territory of place. In so doing, it assumes that the social relationships in which community members participate will be much more intense within this space than beyond. It also assumes that members will treat the place of the community as the prinicipal environment to which they adjust their actions and, correspondingly, that they will monitor local events much more closely than developments further afield. Second, the image implies a certain commonality and coherence, generally expressed either in the functionalist dream of an entity whose insitutional parts fit together neatly to form an integrated whole or in the structural-functionalist cvision of a shared way of life that exists not only in a multiplicity of similar actions but, more profoundly, in a single and interally consistent set of rules, values, or beliefs.”

The link below is to a blog entry that talks about Cisco’s new campaign tagline “The Human Network”. I thought the idea of a human network related to our class discussions.  

http://chasnote.com/?p=241

 that is all – elizabeth

Blog-post 1

I think social capital is best understood when it is broken down into two parts. First what is being social, what is the purpose behind being social? The polite interaction between people  or groups of people, and the purpose or goal those people hope to gain from that interaction relates back to capital. The kind of capital a person might gain from social interaction is a connectedness or tie that positively recommends a strengthening of that tie.  A businessman may be “social” at a party in order to impress upon their boss that they interact well with other people. The boss may then translate their ability to function well with people at a party, to functioning well with them in a working environment, and in turn promote them to a higher position. The idea behind this being that social capital is all about gain and or loss. Gain friends, gain respect, gain status that sets you above others, or mistreat your friends, lose respect and lower your social status; in return the person receives a position within the different communities they belong which correlates with that manipulated social image. Capitalism functions upon this cycle of giving and receiving something that reciprocates what you gave. In the preface to her book, Social Capital, Nan Lin defines capital as “resources twice processed”. She finds that “capital is captured in social relations and that its capture evokes structural constraints and opportunities as well as actions and choices on the part of the actors.”

Dr. Carroll asked us to define what community is.  Community is a word that everyone seems to understand but which is simultaneously difficult to pin down because the definition of what exactly community is can vary widely from person to person. 

For the past week I began tackling this question by contemplating what communities I consider myself to be  a part of; Berry College, Facebook, my job in the telecom office, St. Peter’s Episcopal and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. But, in fact, my personal definition of community extends from friend groups to the town I’ve lived in for the past 8 years. Each one of these communities thrive off of the varying facets which make up my life, and I identify with them each within the distinct contexts of these facets.  Initially, the fact that I am able to identify with another member of any given group allows me to feel as though I too am a member. I see myself as a part of that community.

I have a group of friends who I periodically hang out with who I met (for the most part) on my hall, freshman year of college. I formed a community network with these people because we were all experiencing the same kind of personal growth and adapting to a new environment. The concept of networking is very important in order to understand community. The people within the community must be able to network, or concretely contact other members of that community. All the people from my freshman hall are still friends because we are able to communicate with one another without feeling too constrained or awkward. The network of trust and the ability to share thoughts with one another after two years, knits us together as a community.

However, the community I have with this group of friends is something that I identify with separately than the Berry College community I believe I am a part of. This community is more constrained by social conventions. While I would feel ridiculous running up to a random person on Berry campus and crying about my dog dying, I have no problem doing this to someone from my freshman hall, but I still feel a sense of community with the random Berry College student and my old next door dorm neighbor.

When I studied abroad last fall in England I happened to meet a English student at my Uni who had not only heard  of Berry College, but been a member of Winshape for two summers. This was quite unexpected, but I felt a bond with this person and a sense of community because we had something in common to talk about. This person knew where I was coming from and I knew where they had been. We networked, we connected.

Community, I believe, boils down to connecting with a group of people through social interaction, and being able to network with other people within that group of people on a more intimate level than you would a passing stranger. Sometimes communities can be very casual, such as Facebook, while other communities are tied to you on a more personal level. I think this term is constantly morphing however, and can not be truly pinned down to one strict definition.

that is all – elizabeth