Popular Discourse

Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.  

Turner has written an intensive study of the historical evolution of digital utopianism, tracing its roots to the countercultural forces of the 1960's, with particular emphasis on Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog . The Catalog was inspired by Brand's involvement with systems theory and New Communalist politics (which were based on the spread of information), and connected disparate academic, technological, and countercultural communities. Its focus on reader contributions and practice of publishing financial accounts mirror the interactive and open-source nature of digital utopianism. However, these utopian ideals are compromised by the domination of white educated men. Brand's quest to create collaborating communities led to the creation of the first online community, the WELL, and inspired the immensely popular Wired magazine. With the introduction of the "hacker" came a return to the ideals that defined the New Communalists; namely, the appropriation of the tools of societal control in order to bring about personal empowerment and communal world-building. In search for an understanding of counterculture in today's internet communities, I seek to explore instances in which groups utilize the existing social institutions of the Internet to spread awareness and make political statements, or abandon the existing institutions altogether in favor of a back-to-cyberspace approach of creating communal sites in which individuals work to raise their own consciousnesses and fulfill their human potentials.

Barlow, J.P. (1996). A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.

Barlow, an information technology journalist and pundit, was also once a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Following the passage of the Communications Decency Act, which sought to restrict pornography on the Internet, he crafted a treatise in defense of the independence of the Internet from bureaucratic attempts at regulation. This essay, which was posted and widely circulated on the Internet, suggested that the Internet allowed for the possibility of a social revolution. Barlow painted a picture of a world in which the oppressive forces of the government were replaced by the pursuit of individual enlightenment, communality, and collective consciousness. Barlow's work in collaboration with Wired magazine established a movement inspired by an ideology of digital utopianism. In what ways has this ideology integrated into the public consciousness?   In my own research on online social networking communities, I would like to examine how these sites contribute to as well as diminish the creation of a "digital utopia".

Erickson, T. (1997). Social interaction on the net: Virtual community as participatory genre. Proceedings from HICSS: Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences . Maui, HI.

The author problematizes the notion of "virtual communities," defending instead the position that digital communication is a participatory genre. In a linguistic analysis of an online community called Café Utne, he notes that in this context sequentiality is preserved, all participants see the same thing, and newcomers are able to view the entire conversation prior to participating themselves. Though online interactions do not necessitate personal relationships (as is the case in a community), they do however work to create shared informational artifacts through virtual discourse. In this way, "virtual communities" can be viewed as rapidly evolving genres, which emerge through the reciprocal interaction between institutionalized practices and individuals' participation. This article was written prior to the advent of social networking services, and as such many of the concepts employed are inapplicable to novel forms of Internet communication and interactivity.

Knorr, A. (2006). The online nomads of cyberia. Proceedings from 9th EASA Biennial Conference: Europe and the World . Bristol, United Kingdom.

Based on fieldwork amongst a community of online gaming fans, Knorr argues that the field of anthropology is well-suited for the study of online communities as sites of sociocultural appropriation. The habitat of an online community is located within the Internet infrastructure, a dynamic space that utilizes multiple forms of mediated technology. Rather than limiting communication to the common shared interest, members of the group exchange gossip, create hierarchies, and establish new spaces for group interaction when older forms are obliterated. The community in question is described as a "nomadic tribe" that retain interpersonal structure regardless of geographic or even Internet space. The members of this community can best be described, not as consumers of technology, but as active creators of their online habitat. In this sense Internet communication technologies are reconstructed through a process of appropriation. So too are social networking communities appropriated as they are reworked to suit individual groups, as is the case in online activism and the geographical dispersion of subcultures.

Boase, J. & Wellman, B. (2004). Personal relationships: On and off the Internet. In Vangelisti, A.L. & Perlman, D. (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of personal relationships (pp. 709-727). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The authors problematize early utopian and dystopian views of computer-mediated communication (CMC), citing more recent studies that found no extreme effect of Internet use on society. They propose a theory of "networked individualism" that describes the process of social change that has been occurring since the Industrial Revolution. With the process of modernization, social relationships have become weaker and more dispersed, increasingly transitory as well as socially diverse. CMC is useful for maintaining a large network of weak ties, many of which do not intersect. This increases the spread of information between social groups, or bridging social capital. Many implications for my research came to mind: the psychological importance of CMC for those who've recently transitioned into a new social environment, the integrity of group formation that lacks offline interaction, changing notions of social satisfaction (quantity over quality?), and the potential for narcissism inherent in organized identity performance and public representations of social and cultural capital.