[Originally an assignment essay submitted for the module "Researching Society" in Univ of Warwick, 12/2006. ]
Assignment: Identify an item of published research that includes material that addresses research design and ethical issues. Write a critical assessment of the design of the research and of some aspects of the ethics of the research.
Tearoom Trade, a book written from Laud Humphreys’ PhD thesis in Harvard, was the first-ever study about the homosexual encounters in US public toilet (nicknamed ‘tearoom’ in its practitioners’ circle), an illegal offence when the project was conducted in late 1960s. After its debut, this book was soon reviewed as “a remarkable achievement[1]” and bestowed the 1969 C. Wright Mills Award by Society for the Study of Social Problems. But four decades later, it is now mostly remembered as “notorious[2]” for corrupted research ethics. What does this story tell? This is the theme to explore in this essay.
In the first section I will briefly outline the design of this study, followed by a critical review, in second section, of the defenses Humphrey presented in his last chapter. I will further explore the issue of whether deception and invasion into subjects privacy is justifiable in section three and four, from the perspective of sociology community and Humphreys himself. Through these presentations, I shall argue that while it’s necessary to regard Humphreys’ methods as unethical within sociology community, there exists an alternative perspective from which his efforts, seen as a form of political intervention, may be justified.
Tearoom Trade－Its Research Design
In the study reported in Tearoom Trade, Humphreys devised a sophisticated research design with use of a variety of disguises, to tackle the sensitive subject matter. In the first stage, he got the access to enter the hidden scenes in the ‘tearooms’ by assuming the role of ‘watchqueeen,’ a lookout voyeur responsible for signaling if policemen or strangers approached when other participants were enjoying a variety of physical interactions. By playing this role, he was able to observe and record not only his subjects’ characteristics and behaviors, but also their car registration numbers. In the second stage, he managed to trace the name and addresses of his sampled car number from the police in the disguise of a ‘market research.’ And then he successfully reached a group of subjects, got into their house, and interviewed those men whose homosexual behaviour he had previously watched in public toilets, all in the disguise of a “social health survey.” In order to minimize the chance of being recognized, Humphreys deliberately waited until a year later, changed his hairstyle and even get a new car. As one of its major critic commented (Warwick 1982), this study may well “hold the world record” for its “concentration of mispresentation and disguises.”
Humphreys’ Defenses
It is unethical for a sociologist to deliberately misrepresent his identity for the purpose of entering a private domain…It is unethical for sociologist to deliberately misrepresent the character of the research in which he is engaged.
－ Erikson (1967 373)
Humphreys was aware of the potential ethics controversies underlying his use of covert design, especially after Erikson published a strong critique of disguise research in 1967[3]. Then, how did he respond to the foreseeable challenges?
In his last chapter titled “Postscript: A Question of Ethics”, Humphreys presented a series of defenses. He first defended the use of covert method by pointing out “any conceivable method employable in the study of human behavior has at least some potential for harming others (169),” and therefore research ethics shouldn’t be considered in absolute terms but instead be adopted in different circumstances by “weighting possible social benefits against possible cost in human discomfort (170).” He also noted (170) that few interviewers he knew would be “completely honest with his respondents,” otherwise the whole concern of effective questionnaire construction “could be dropped.” Here it is apparent that Humphrey subscribed to an ethical stance falling somewhere between the “situation ethics” and “pervasive ethical transgression” in Bryman’s typology (2001 478)－a stance that has its legitimacy but leave whether the specific study is justifiable to be further determined.
Humphreys then went on defending his study against the charge of deception and violation of subject’s privacy. He presented two arguments about the first-stage participatory research. (1) Everyone in the tearoom was represented only as participant, and he “was indeed a “voyeur,” though in the sociological and not the sexual sense.” Hence he claimed, “ I misrepresented my identity no more than anyone else.” (2) His activities were intended to gain entrance not to “a private domain” but to a public restroom.
These two justifications, however, are totally faulty. First, indeed everyone in the restroom conceals their other identities, but a shared identity was that all came here for sexual curiosity－a identity Humphrey misrepresented. Second, as Reynold rightly noted (1982 197), the very existence of the role ‘watchqueen’ defined the scene a private one, despite it’s physically located in a public building.
About the second-stage disguised survey, he justified his approach by appealing to the existence of multiple uses of archive data. “Is it unethical to use data that someone has gathered for purpose one of which is unknown to the respondent,” he asked. This defense, again, is weak since making use of data collected for other purposes does not involve a deliberate act of deception (though the issue of privacy may arise).
The only convincing defense about his methods seems to be the efforts he made to protect his respondents’ privacy from the public (while not from him). He claimed, in presenting research result, he’d made every effort to conceal all identifying tag of his subjects, indeed a difficult task when he has to avoid data distortion[4]. However, this deliberation for safeguarding the subjects’ identities from the public did not change the fact that he did deceive the subjects and violate their privacy. Then, the question remains is: Was it worthy?
Was It Worthy? －Shifting Ethics in Sociology
Is deception and invasion of subjects’ privacy worthy in this study?
Among others, Warwick (1982 57-58) presented the most-cited[5] objections against their worthiness: (1) Humphreys took a relatively powerless group that cannot challenge this study, (2) deception and privacy invasion would spread a trickery image of sociologist and made future research more difficult, and (3) these very means would encourage similar behavior in other part of the society, which untimely help produces “a society of cynics, liars and manipulators” and “undermine the trust which is essential to a just social order.” This compelling passage, which I subscribe to[6], explains the way in which Tearoom Trade is presented in today’s methodology textbook.
However, it must be noted that ethics is a form of social construction that evolves across time. In late 1960s, this very question must had been considered worthy among some sociologists if the expected gain of knowledge is substantial, otherwise this project, one supervised in the most prestigious institution worldwide, would not had been done[7]. A survey of the book reviews published in academic journals seems to verify this point－most of the critiques were placed on its lack of deeper investigation of the causes and their motivations, while little attention were paid to ethical issues[8]. Therefore, placing all the condemnation on Humphrey and ignoring the intellectual background in which he was raised won’t do him justice.
Tearoom Trade as a Political Intervention
In the last section, I wish to point out a more profound aspect of Humphreys’ radical engagement in this controversial research design. I shall argue that, while it is justifiable for the mainstream sociologist community to distant themselves from the strategies employed in Tearoom Trade, one need to lift this study from the purely academic discourse, and reinterpret it as a maneuver of political intervention for a fully appreciation.
What’s most apparent in Humphrey’s passages is his concern for the suppressed homosexual community and his aspiration to make a change. He wrote with passion “the greatest harm a social scientist could do to [homosexual group] would be to ignore… (169).” And he concluded his chapters with a policy suggestion and a plea for greater tolerance toward homosexual group. He even seems to regard this research as a competition with the social control institutions when he claimed he has more concern “that a group of law students and their advisors would be the first to risk involvement in such a study,” rather than “that some sociologist might endanger his ethical integrity (168).”
Indeed, as Warwick (1982 56) commented, such an ambition presented a “rather inflated sense of professional self-importance.” Bulmer also pointed out (1982 226) the consequence of a published research is “not within the control of the researcher.” These comments presented a more modest and more restricted self-image of sociologists, which I believe shall be a rule for most sociologists.
But at any stage of history, there would always be some anomies that eventually shift the history by not following the agreed rules. In that regard, naïve as Humphrey may be, his controversial work nonetheless rebutted some then-prevailing stereotype, successfully attracted much public attention to homosexual issues, and fostered the related debates. These are processes that have their credit for leading some consequential legal and social changes, e.g., the later abolishment of homosexual discriminating laws[9]. So, can we consider Humphrey as one of such figure－one condemned in the academic court but redeemed in historical court? This question is difficult to answer, but apparently he was well received by some, especially among the homosexual-friendly organizations[10], those organizations that are supposed to have represented his subject group－the very “victims” of Humphreys’ wrong-doing in his critics’ eyes.
Warwick was right in pointing out (1982 58) “A democratic nation is ultimately built upon respect of constitutional processes and restraint in the use of means.” But in the realm of the suppressed, maybe the nation just does not seems like a truly democratic one. And what they look for is not a restricted scientist, but a hero who is daring and capable for making a sound you cannot ignore. In this regard, research ethics has little to say.
REFERENCE
BRYMAN, A., 2001. Social research methods. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
BULMER, M., 1982. The merits and demerits of covert participant observation. In: M. BULMER, ed, Social research ethics: an examination of the merits of covert participant observation. London: Macmillan, pp. 217-251.
BURGESS, R.G., 1984. In the field : an introduction to field research. London: Allen & Unwin.
ERIKSON, K.T., 1967. A Comment on Disguised Observation in Sociology. Social Problems, 14(4), pp. 366-373.
HOFFMAN, M., 1971. Book Review: Tearoom Trade. Arvhices of Sexual Behaviors, 1(1), pp. 98-100.
HOMAN, R., 1991. The ethics of social research. London: Longman.
HUMPHREYS, R.A.L., 1980. Social Science: Ethics of Research. Science, 207(4432), pp. 712-714.
REISS, I.L., 1971. Book Review: Tearoom Trade. American Sociological Review, 36(3), pp. 581-583.
REYNOLDS, P.D., 1982. Moral Judgemnets: strategies for analysis with applicaiton to covert participant observation. In: M. BULMER, ed, Social research ethics : an examination of the merits of covert participant observation. London: Macmillan, pp. 185-213.
ROSEN, L., 1972. Book Review: Tearoom Trade. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 34(2), pp. 382-384.
WARWICK, D.P., 1982. Tearoom Trade: Means and Ends in Social Research. In: M. BULMER, ed, Social research ethics: an examination of the merits of covert participant observation. London: Macmillan, pp. 38-58.
WIENS, A.N., 1971. Book Review: Tearoom Trade. Contemporary Psychology, 16(7), pp. 430-432.
Endnotes
[1] In the first book review about this study in academic journals, see Hoffman, 1970. There seems an interesting shift of how Tearoom Trade was reviewed in different time. This will be explored in p.
[2] See Bulmer (1982 222). Homan (1991 101), in a more neutral tone, also identify Tearoom Trade as “one of the most noticed and controversial cases of arguable unethical methodology in the history of social research.” In a popular methodology textbook (Bryman 2001 477), this study was presented as one of the “infamous” cases.
[3] He carried out this project between 1965-1968. Therefore he was roughly half-completed his project when Erikson published his critiques.
[4] He wrote (172) “[t]he question I have always asked in this connection is: Could the respondent still recognize himself without having any others recognize him? I may have failed in a few cases to meet the first part of this standard, but I am confident that I have not failed to meet the second.” I consider this quotation a gold standard in handling interview material.
[5] See, e.g., Bulmer (1982 222), Burgess (1984 187) and Homan (1991 110-111).
[6] However, this does not means that Warwick’s argument was without question. For instance, he illustrated the power relation issue by supposing the case that Humphrey “passed as a voyeuristic gardener or chauffeur for a prominent family,” then he alleged, “he would have been subject to legal and other kinds of reaction.” However, I don’t see this would be the case if Humphrey did what Warwick supposed and also took pain to conceal the “prominent family’s” identity. Because any significant reaction that family took would simply reveal their connection with Humphrey’s work.
[7] Humphrey in a letter he wrote to Science reflected that (1980) “research ethics” was not even mentioned in his graduate training.
[8] See Reiss (1971), Wiens (1971), Hoffman (1971) and Rosen (1972).
[9] Reynolds (1982 199), among others, suggested this connection.
[10] He was even elected to a position in the National Committee of Sexual Civil Liberties.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Traditions of Sociology: Three Works Compared
[Originally the asignment essay submitted for the module "Researching Society" in Wariwick, 11/2006. Task specified below. ]
Task: Compare and contrast a study of your choice drawn from any one tradition of social research with a study selected from another tradition of social research.
Preliminary Methodological Notes
This assignment, in the very way it is phrased, presupposes that the existence of different traditions of sociological research from which we can “draw” or “select” specific studies for comparison. Such presumptions conceals two debatable issues about the sociological research traditions, namely (1) the ontological question of whether these traditions are objectively existing currents of research that emerged in the history of sociological studies, or should they be seen as conceptual frameworks that are observer-dependent, and (2) the methodological question of how a specific study can be meaningfully placed into any research tradition. The two issues shall be addressed later.
There are, however, some straightforward ways to get around these issues to accomplish the assignment－for instance, by choosing two classic works that in a generally agreed sense definite different research traditions (e.g., Weber’s Protestant Ethic and Durkeim’s Suicide) or by using two contemporary works of which the authors explicitly identify his/her research with specific traditions[1]. By taking these strategies, a respondent can have substantial points to make while “externalizing” the troublesome issues to the instruction of the assignment, to our common knowledge, or to the statement given by the author of the selected works.
These strategies are certainly legitimate and have their merits. For one thing, in an assignment at this length, these approaches enable respondent to focus on the core material covered in this lecture, namely the principal differences among different research traditions. However, they also have some major drawbacks. First, by comparing two researches deliberately selected to represent different traditions, it would be easy to produce a report that reflects more the a priori selection criteria than the genuine observation obtained from their critical reviews. Second, it also excludes the chance to appreciate how a more general, less-typical research could be discussed in terms of those “traditions.”
In this essay, I took an alternative approach. Instead of selecting two studies according to some given categories, I just take a recent read, The Sociology of Sociology edited by Reynolds in 1970, and pick the first three articles from its “empirical” section. I am aware that the choice is risky since studies sampled this way may well be too similar (given the fact that they were all written around the same time and included in the same collection[2]) to draw any substantial contrasts, but I consider this risk compensated by the two issues I discussed in the previous section.
About the Selected Studies
The articles I chose are:
Crane, D., Social Structure in a Group of Scientist: A Test of the “Invisible College”
In this article, Crane sought to test the hypothesis of “invisible college[3]” by demonstrating the structure of the social ties among a group of rural sociologist. Empirical data of their informal communication, collaboration and citation were collected for socio-metric analysis, which indicated more loosely structured patterns than previously supposed.
Vaughan T. and L. Reynolds, The Sociology of Symbolic Interactionism
Vaughan and Reynolds departed from an attempt to report the diversity of symbolic interactionists’ attitude regarding the applicability of symbolic interactionism in the explanation of macro-social changes. They then classified the respondents into supporting/ challenging groups according to their responses, and sought to examine whether the respondent allocated into same group are associated by some sociological factors (e.g., interconnection during postgraduate training and academic appointments, obtained from the subjects’ biographical data). They also tried to offer some theoretical interpretation of the observed pattern (p 324).
Horowitz, I., Mainliners and Marginals: The Human Shape of Sociological Theory
This piece of work started from the controversial issue whether sociology should concern itself with its disciplinary history or better flush the historical memories away as “humanistic hubris” (p 340). Horowitz took the diverse attitudes among sociologists as different “responses to the emergence of the field of sociology as an organizational framework and…as a human enterprise (p 341),” and sought to overcome the theoretical dichotomy by (1) proposing four attitude-types[4] based on two pairs of sociological styles, and (2) placing a functional role to each category.
Comparison and Discussions
Positivism vs. Interpretivism
The three researches, while all devoted to the understanding of sociologists’ professional communities, employ methodologies that have distinctive features. The methodologically rigorous research[5] by Crane took an explicitly positivist approach in the sense that every claim she made about the sociological structure was demonstrated by concrete, quantitative evidence collected empirically. In contrast, Horowitz’s rich text was mainly an interpretive project in which the heuristic device (the typology of attitude) he developed bears great resemblance with Max Weber’s Ideal type. In between them, Vaughan and Reynolds’s paper can be best described as a multi-strategy project that brought both positive and interpretative components together. In an earlier stage, they converted the respondents’ subjective feedbacks, by means of their interpretative mind, into categories that enable the positivistic testing of the association between attitudes and certain social factors. Later they took the way around and interpret the empirically obtained results to obtain theoretically relevant conclusion.
Individualism, Functionalism, and Middle-Range Theory
Despite these methodological differences, however, there exist great similarities among the three studies. First of all, they all assumed a “methodological individualistic” perspective, namely the approach to understand ‘the sociological’ by accumulating our knowledge of ’the individuals’ (O'Neill 1973). While Crane talked about ‘structure,’ Vaughan examined ‘social factors,’ both of notions are actually conceptualized as an aggregated form of the social interactions in individual level. Second, scale-wise, whether it’s an empirical verification a theoretical notion, an attempted association between attitudes and social connection, or the proposal of a set of ideal types, all these projects fall within the spectrum of “middle range theory” (Merton 1949). Third, while two of the projects are inspired by some theoretical disputes (social interactionism’s capability in explaining social change, and the disciplinary history of sociology), they either sought to “explain” the factors affecting the dispute or to “interpret” the differences, and their obvious reluctance in making critical comments presented a vivid posture of “value neutrality.”
These similarities clearly reflect the intellectual background of 1960s American sociology, which was dominated by the focus on social action (symbolic interactions) with a functionalist’s view[6]. These characteristics are of special importance since the purpose of the whole collection was to inspire sociologists’ “self-consciousness” of their own discipline by seeking to “explain sociology sociologically” (see its preface, pp. v-vi). Its underlying calling was to resist the prevailing doctrine of positivism in 1960s American sociology[7]. Yet now, after thirty six years, a careful reading of these works that were explicitly written to reflect the discipline and paradigms of sociology, you will find plenty signs of the influence (or conditioning) of the very tradition they sought to challenge. This is understandable, since it was the very tradition that had provided them with available conceptual toolkits. And they were simply restricted by the lack of other theoretical tools then. A comparison with later works enlightened by critical theories, Foucault’s theory, Feminism or postmodernism can make this point clear.
Theory, Problem and Methods
The above review of these works revealed several aspects of the relations between theory[8], problem, and research. First, the restrictions resulted from the lack of certain theoretical tools, as shown in those old-time studies, in a way suggest how theory as conceptual tool enlightens the framing of new research questions and methods. In the other hand, both the first two works yielded empirical finding that can’t be accounted in original theoretical frames, which can (e.g., Vaughan) led the researcher to revise their theories.
Furthermore, in the meta-theoretical level, much of the comparison and discussion are carried out not by citing the authors’ own accounts, but by measuring these researches with a “conceptual map of traditions” in my mind. This is not only because these papers devoted little paragraph on their philosophical position. Even if they did, the conceptual frame I imposed will still be necessary because it incorporated elements (here, theories about sociology traditions) that were unknown to these writers, and would therefore provide appreciation of their works in a way unknown to them. This is actually an application of my first argument in the meta-theoretical level.
To conclude this essay, I would like to address the two issues laid in the opening paragraph based on the analysis demonstrated above. While it is not my intention reject the existence of objective currents of sociological research, I would still argue, the notion of sociological traditions ONLY matters to me as a conceptual map of the ideal types of different traditions, which (1) helps me to contrast various conceptual dimensions, ontological, epistemological, or methodological, (2) is observer- dependent, and (3) would change as new concept is incorporated, and therefore won’t remain identical across time. Any specific study should be measured by the conceptual dimensions laid out in this map for a closer appreciation, and whether is belongs to one specific tradition or not is less relevant.
References
Craib, Ian. 1984. Modern social theory : From parsons to habermas. Brighton: Harvester.
Crane, Diana. 1970. Social structure in a group of scientist: A test of the "invisible college" hypothesis. In The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners., eds. Larry Thomas Reynolds, Janice McKenna Reynolds, 295-323. New York: David McKay Co.
Friedrichs, Robert W. 1970. A sociology of sociology. New York; London: Free Press; Collier-Macmillan.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1970. Mainliners and marginals: The human shape of sociological theory. In The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners., eds. Larry Thomas Reynolds, Janice McKenna Reynolds, 340-370. New York: David McKay Co.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press.
Merton, Robert King. 1949. Social theory and social structure; toward the codification of theory and research. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Mouzelis, Nicos P. 1995. Sociological theory : What went wrong? : Diagnosis and remedies. London: Routledge.
O'Neill, John. 1973. Modes of individualism and collectivism. London: Heinemann Educational.
Price, D. J., and D. Beaver. 1966. Collaboration in an invisible college. American Psychologist 21, : 1011-1018.
Reynolds, Larry Thomas, and Janice McKenna Reynolds, eds. 1970. The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners. New York: David McKay Co.
Vaughan, Ted R., and Larry Thomas Reynolds. 1970. The sociology of symbolic interactionism. In The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners., eds. Larry Thomas Reynolds, Janice McKenna Reynolds, 324-339. New York: David McKay Co.
Endnotes
[1] The two strategies are deliberately presented in parallel to contrast the methodological issue (which will be explored in p. 6) of labeling a study by a posteriori reading or by sticking to author’s own statement. In many actual studies, we may well find conflicts between the two ways of labeling.
[2] In fact, the decision to include three pieces instead of two is aimed to reduce such risk.
[3] The concept of ‘invisible college’ is defined here (p 314) as “an elite of mutually interacting and productive scientists within a research area.” This term was earlier used by Merton and publicized by Price (1966, 1011-1018). Its concept was inspired by Kuhn’s description of scientist working under the same ‘paradigm’ (1962, 187).
[4] Horowitz first made the division between organizational ‘mainliner’ and ‘marginal’ and then he further divided the former, according to their ideologies, into professionalist and occupationalist, and the later, antisociologist and unsociologist.
[5] Crane actually showed more commitment to the development of research methodology than the “substantial content” of the research. In the closing paragraphs, the three suggestions for further investigation she made are all related to the development of research method (pp 316-318).
[6] The two characteristics can be traced back to Max Weber and Durkheim, two major source Parson drawn from as theoretical ground for his ‘social system’ thesis. Parsons is believed to be responsible for popularity (as well as some mis-reading) of Weber and Durkheim among American sociologist in mid-20th century, see Craib, 1984, Ch 3.
[7] American sociology during late-1960s to early-1970s was characterized a sense of orientation due to the mounting discontent of the prevailing Parsonian sociology. Partially inspired by Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolution and the later development of American sociology of knowledge, sociologist started to apply the methods of sociology to sociology itself. The year 1970 alone witnessed two books published under the identical title Sociology of Sociology (Friedrichs & Reynolds and Reynolds), followed by A Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology and the new journal Insurgent Sociologist, both published in the next year.
[8] The scope of this assignment prevented a detailed discussion for different types of theoy and their implication. Nonetheless reader shall be reminded that the notion ‘theory’ has multiple ways to define. For instance, see Mouzelis’s (1995 1-2)distinction between theory as tools and end-products.
Task: Compare and contrast a study of your choice drawn from any one tradition of social research with a study selected from another tradition of social research.
Preliminary Methodological Notes
This assignment, in the very way it is phrased, presupposes that the existence of different traditions of sociological research from which we can “draw” or “select” specific studies for comparison. Such presumptions conceals two debatable issues about the sociological research traditions, namely (1) the ontological question of whether these traditions are objectively existing currents of research that emerged in the history of sociological studies, or should they be seen as conceptual frameworks that are observer-dependent, and (2) the methodological question of how a specific study can be meaningfully placed into any research tradition. The two issues shall be addressed later.
There are, however, some straightforward ways to get around these issues to accomplish the assignment－for instance, by choosing two classic works that in a generally agreed sense definite different research traditions (e.g., Weber’s Protestant Ethic and Durkeim’s Suicide) or by using two contemporary works of which the authors explicitly identify his/her research with specific traditions[1]. By taking these strategies, a respondent can have substantial points to make while “externalizing” the troublesome issues to the instruction of the assignment, to our common knowledge, or to the statement given by the author of the selected works.
These strategies are certainly legitimate and have their merits. For one thing, in an assignment at this length, these approaches enable respondent to focus on the core material covered in this lecture, namely the principal differences among different research traditions. However, they also have some major drawbacks. First, by comparing two researches deliberately selected to represent different traditions, it would be easy to produce a report that reflects more the a priori selection criteria than the genuine observation obtained from their critical reviews. Second, it also excludes the chance to appreciate how a more general, less-typical research could be discussed in terms of those “traditions.”
In this essay, I took an alternative approach. Instead of selecting two studies according to some given categories, I just take a recent read, The Sociology of Sociology edited by Reynolds in 1970, and pick the first three articles from its “empirical” section. I am aware that the choice is risky since studies sampled this way may well be too similar (given the fact that they were all written around the same time and included in the same collection[2]) to draw any substantial contrasts, but I consider this risk compensated by the two issues I discussed in the previous section.
About the Selected Studies
The articles I chose are:
Crane, D., Social Structure in a Group of Scientist: A Test of the “Invisible College”
In this article, Crane sought to test the hypothesis of “invisible college[3]” by demonstrating the structure of the social ties among a group of rural sociologist. Empirical data of their informal communication, collaboration and citation were collected for socio-metric analysis, which indicated more loosely structured patterns than previously supposed.
Vaughan T. and L. Reynolds, The Sociology of Symbolic Interactionism
Vaughan and Reynolds departed from an attempt to report the diversity of symbolic interactionists’ attitude regarding the applicability of symbolic interactionism in the explanation of macro-social changes. They then classified the respondents into supporting/ challenging groups according to their responses, and sought to examine whether the respondent allocated into same group are associated by some sociological factors (e.g., interconnection during postgraduate training and academic appointments, obtained from the subjects’ biographical data). They also tried to offer some theoretical interpretation of the observed pattern (p 324).
Horowitz, I., Mainliners and Marginals: The Human Shape of Sociological Theory
This piece of work started from the controversial issue whether sociology should concern itself with its disciplinary history or better flush the historical memories away as “humanistic hubris” (p 340). Horowitz took the diverse attitudes among sociologists as different “responses to the emergence of the field of sociology as an organizational framework and…as a human enterprise (p 341),” and sought to overcome the theoretical dichotomy by (1) proposing four attitude-types[4] based on two pairs of sociological styles, and (2) placing a functional role to each category.
Comparison and Discussions
Positivism vs. Interpretivism
The three researches, while all devoted to the understanding of sociologists’ professional communities, employ methodologies that have distinctive features. The methodologically rigorous research[5] by Crane took an explicitly positivist approach in the sense that every claim she made about the sociological structure was demonstrated by concrete, quantitative evidence collected empirically. In contrast, Horowitz’s rich text was mainly an interpretive project in which the heuristic device (the typology of attitude) he developed bears great resemblance with Max Weber’s Ideal type. In between them, Vaughan and Reynolds’s paper can be best described as a multi-strategy project that brought both positive and interpretative components together. In an earlier stage, they converted the respondents’ subjective feedbacks, by means of their interpretative mind, into categories that enable the positivistic testing of the association between attitudes and certain social factors. Later they took the way around and interpret the empirically obtained results to obtain theoretically relevant conclusion.
Individualism, Functionalism, and Middle-Range Theory
Despite these methodological differences, however, there exist great similarities among the three studies. First of all, they all assumed a “methodological individualistic” perspective, namely the approach to understand ‘the sociological’ by accumulating our knowledge of ’the individuals’ (O'Neill 1973). While Crane talked about ‘structure,’ Vaughan examined ‘social factors,’ both of notions are actually conceptualized as an aggregated form of the social interactions in individual level. Second, scale-wise, whether it’s an empirical verification a theoretical notion, an attempted association between attitudes and social connection, or the proposal of a set of ideal types, all these projects fall within the spectrum of “middle range theory” (Merton 1949). Third, while two of the projects are inspired by some theoretical disputes (social interactionism’s capability in explaining social change, and the disciplinary history of sociology), they either sought to “explain” the factors affecting the dispute or to “interpret” the differences, and their obvious reluctance in making critical comments presented a vivid posture of “value neutrality.”
These similarities clearly reflect the intellectual background of 1960s American sociology, which was dominated by the focus on social action (symbolic interactions) with a functionalist’s view[6]. These characteristics are of special importance since the purpose of the whole collection was to inspire sociologists’ “self-consciousness” of their own discipline by seeking to “explain sociology sociologically” (see its preface, pp. v-vi). Its underlying calling was to resist the prevailing doctrine of positivism in 1960s American sociology[7]. Yet now, after thirty six years, a careful reading of these works that were explicitly written to reflect the discipline and paradigms of sociology, you will find plenty signs of the influence (or conditioning) of the very tradition they sought to challenge. This is understandable, since it was the very tradition that had provided them with available conceptual toolkits. And they were simply restricted by the lack of other theoretical tools then. A comparison with later works enlightened by critical theories, Foucault’s theory, Feminism or postmodernism can make this point clear.
Theory, Problem and Methods
The above review of these works revealed several aspects of the relations between theory[8], problem, and research. First, the restrictions resulted from the lack of certain theoretical tools, as shown in those old-time studies, in a way suggest how theory as conceptual tool enlightens the framing of new research questions and methods. In the other hand, both the first two works yielded empirical finding that can’t be accounted in original theoretical frames, which can (e.g., Vaughan) led the researcher to revise their theories.
Furthermore, in the meta-theoretical level, much of the comparison and discussion are carried out not by citing the authors’ own accounts, but by measuring these researches with a “conceptual map of traditions” in my mind. This is not only because these papers devoted little paragraph on their philosophical position. Even if they did, the conceptual frame I imposed will still be necessary because it incorporated elements (here, theories about sociology traditions) that were unknown to these writers, and would therefore provide appreciation of their works in a way unknown to them. This is actually an application of my first argument in the meta-theoretical level.
To conclude this essay, I would like to address the two issues laid in the opening paragraph based on the analysis demonstrated above. While it is not my intention reject the existence of objective currents of sociological research, I would still argue, the notion of sociological traditions ONLY matters to me as a conceptual map of the ideal types of different traditions, which (1) helps me to contrast various conceptual dimensions, ontological, epistemological, or methodological, (2) is observer- dependent, and (3) would change as new concept is incorporated, and therefore won’t remain identical across time. Any specific study should be measured by the conceptual dimensions laid out in this map for a closer appreciation, and whether is belongs to one specific tradition or not is less relevant.
References
Craib, Ian. 1984. Modern social theory : From parsons to habermas. Brighton: Harvester.
Crane, Diana. 1970. Social structure in a group of scientist: A test of the "invisible college" hypothesis. In The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners., eds. Larry Thomas Reynolds, Janice McKenna Reynolds, 295-323. New York: David McKay Co.
Friedrichs, Robert W. 1970. A sociology of sociology. New York; London: Free Press; Collier-Macmillan.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1970. Mainliners and marginals: The human shape of sociological theory. In The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners., eds. Larry Thomas Reynolds, Janice McKenna Reynolds, 340-370. New York: David McKay Co.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press.
Merton, Robert King. 1949. Social theory and social structure; toward the codification of theory and research. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Mouzelis, Nicos P. 1995. Sociological theory : What went wrong? : Diagnosis and remedies. London: Routledge.
O'Neill, John. 1973. Modes of individualism and collectivism. London: Heinemann Educational.
Price, D. J., and D. Beaver. 1966. Collaboration in an invisible college. American Psychologist 21, : 1011-1018.
Reynolds, Larry Thomas, and Janice McKenna Reynolds, eds. 1970. The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners. New York: David McKay Co.
Vaughan, Ted R., and Larry Thomas Reynolds. 1970. The sociology of symbolic interactionism. In The sociology of sociology: Analysis and criticism of the thought, research, and ethical folkways of sociology and its practitioners., eds. Larry Thomas Reynolds, Janice McKenna Reynolds, 324-339. New York: David McKay Co.
Endnotes
[1] The two strategies are deliberately presented in parallel to contrast the methodological issue (which will be explored in p. 6) of labeling a study by a posteriori reading or by sticking to author’s own statement. In many actual studies, we may well find conflicts between the two ways of labeling.
[2] In fact, the decision to include three pieces instead of two is aimed to reduce such risk.
[3] The concept of ‘invisible college’ is defined here (p 314) as “an elite of mutually interacting and productive scientists within a research area.” This term was earlier used by Merton and publicized by Price (1966, 1011-1018). Its concept was inspired by Kuhn’s description of scientist working under the same ‘paradigm’ (1962, 187).
[4] Horowitz first made the division between organizational ‘mainliner’ and ‘marginal’ and then he further divided the former, according to their ideologies, into professionalist and occupationalist, and the later, antisociologist and unsociologist.
[5] Crane actually showed more commitment to the development of research methodology than the “substantial content” of the research. In the closing paragraphs, the three suggestions for further investigation she made are all related to the development of research method (pp 316-318).
[6] The two characteristics can be traced back to Max Weber and Durkheim, two major source Parson drawn from as theoretical ground for his ‘social system’ thesis. Parsons is believed to be responsible for popularity (as well as some mis-reading) of Weber and Durkheim among American sociologist in mid-20th century, see Craib, 1984, Ch 3.
[7] American sociology during late-1960s to early-1970s was characterized a sense of orientation due to the mounting discontent of the prevailing Parsonian sociology. Partially inspired by Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolution and the later development of American sociology of knowledge, sociologist started to apply the methods of sociology to sociology itself. The year 1970 alone witnessed two books published under the identical title Sociology of Sociology (Friedrichs & Reynolds and Reynolds), followed by A Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology and the new journal Insurgent Sociologist, both published in the next year.
[8] The scope of this assignment prevented a detailed discussion for different types of theoy and their implication. Nonetheless reader shall be reminded that the notion ‘theory’ has multiple ways to define. For instance, see Mouzelis’s (1995 1-2)distinction between theory as tools and end-products.
A Thesis that Echos with My Past
[Originally submitted as an assignment for the module "Researching Society" in Univ. of Warwick, 10/2006. In this work we were asked to write a "intellectual autobiography" that relate our current research interest/project with our past experience.] [1]
Committing myself to a critical review of the academic activities of the sociologists in some Asian countries is by no means an accidental idea. Rather, this thesis reflects my ongoing self-inquiring of the role of intellectual in contemporary society, my concern about the Eastern-Western relations in the context of globalisation, and the interests of epistemological issues and academic politics I developed in my intellectual journey through the fields of chemistry, psychology and sociology. Each of these factors can be traced back to different stages of my life. But a water-shedding moment to start with would be the summer of 1993, when I defeated 140 competitors from 34 countries and won the Gold Medal of International Chemistry Olympia.
A Scholar-Wanna-Be Seeking His Field
Thirteen years from then, I can still recall the exhilaration in that dream-like summer. Flower ring on the airport, meeting Taiwan’s President, a large sum of scholarship and automatic admission to the Chemistry department in the most prestigious university in this island－all at once I seemed to achieve what many others could only dream of, and was on a way toward a bright future.
However, stepping down from the exciting height, what I felt was actually an unprecedented sense of lost. Having been encouraged to compete for either schools’ or country’s honour for years, I was finally allowed a chance to ask myself: am I really want to be a Chemist? Surely I want to become some kind of scholar. In traditional Chinese culture, becoming an elite intellectual has always been seen as the default goal for smart kids[2]. In fact, the Chinese name my parents chose for me has a pronunciation similar to the phrase ‘knowledgeable,’ and they’d told me to study for PhD when I was only six! I did incorporate this inking into my self-image, especially after a series of success boosted my confidence; but which field is for me? Furthering on my training in psychology is of course a sensible option. I did appreciate the beauty of the world that the knowledge of chemistry revealed to me; the emerging field of biochemical science also seemed a promising field. Yet whenever I stayed late in lab with bottles and devices, I still wondered: is that all my life would be?
Driven by curiosity to explore, I started to take courses from a wide spectrum. And soon I became convinced that, in shaping our life and future, humanity and social issues are far more important than pure science and technologies. I also found, compared with the well-established ‘paradigms[3]’ in chemistry, the less-settled nature of behavioral and social science sounds a greater challenge. So I changed my major to psychology[4].
Breaking up with Chemistry
Breaking up with the seemly promising career path in Chemistry evoked much doubts from my relative, friends and teachers. Some expressed a sense of pity; some accused me to be unrealistic and willful. And I can still recall how some Chemistry professors dismissed psychology as a ‘pseudo-science’ that won’t worth my talent.
At the age of 19 and still uncertain of many things, I was not ready to stand to argue with these high-profiling scholars. But this process of confrontation did leave some lasting marks in my mind:
First, it was the first time I started to ask why some ‘natural science’ like chemistry was (and may still be) seen as in some sense superior than psychology? In other words, I began to be aware of the interdisciplinary power structure and to feel doubtful.
Second, such doubt inevitably brought me to question and compare the different ‘nature’ of the two disciplines, such as their ends, their assumption of the world, and their ways of investigation, i.e. philosophical issues of ontology and epistemology.
Third, in a subtler, psychological level, it was like to be engaged in a life-long competition with another ‘possible me’ who continued to pursue the chemistry path. This may not be necessary from the stand point of psychological health, but it is this very anxiety for a justification of my decision that drove me along the way to look for ends higher than merely becoming a well-reputed scholar in university, and to question deeper about what values I would place as the axis of my life.
Doubts on Academia and the East-West Theme
Training in psychology didn’t answer the problems of values and ends directly, but it granted me discerning eyes for human mind and behaviour as well as skills to exert positive influences on others. Yes, I told myself this is what I am going to do－to be helper to others, and I did once consider pursuing advanced studies in social psychology or counseling training as path to this end.
However, I was halted later by more exposure to some local researches, because they seemed more like academic-jargon plays than genuine intellectual explorations. In particular, a large portion of these works seemed nothing but uncritical implantation of certain Western theoretical model on Taiwan that generated piles of ‘empirical’ data, which, from the eyes of a native resident here (me), makes little sense.
Disappointed and lost, I couldn’t help wonder: Must academic work be done by this way? Are scholars doing their job as the way they are supposed to? These questions brought me to reflect on the end and practices of academic research, again, but this time I went a bit further to ask how certain institutional characteristics of local academia (e.g., funding allocation, publication format) were influencing academic outputs, and that was my first encounter with sociology of knowledge.
In particular, I wondered how the existing modes of practices are related to the fact that psychology was a subject imported from the West[5]. This East-West thesis is no stranger for a child growing up in 1980s Taiwan. In school we were taught the disgraceful history of how China[6] and some other Asian countries was invaded by Western super powers in 19th centuries, while we are also taught how the West are nowadays symbols of the good, free, democratic, and modern world[7], as against to the bad communist world, which include our then enemy, communist China. Resentment (for what they’ve done) mixed with aspiration (for their modernity) and identity (we are on their side)－we as kids developed a fairy contradictory feelings of the West. And it was so natural that we place the tension of the relationship with the West as a central theme in any serious speculation about us.
Globalisation in Focus
With doubts of the academia reality I chose to join the ‘real world’ after graduating from university, first fulfilling the compulsory military service and later working as editor and marketing specialist for a leading publisher in Taiwan.
Within just a few years, I witnessed not a few tremendous changes in Taiwan. I saw the rise of cyber-biz along with the digital anxiety since 1998, I experienced Taiwan’s agony over diversified identities on 2000’s President Election[8], I witnessed the worst-ever economic setback in 2001[9], and I observed the turmoil and debates after 9-11. Each of these events affected the lives of many individual, and yet none of them can be adequately understood without something of greater scope (e.g. technology, national identity, global economy, international relations) is taken into account[10]. And all these issues seemed converge in one word: globalisation. To explore more on globalisation, I went to London School of Economics in 2002 studying for MSc in Sociology.
A Conjunction of Future and Past
Three years after graduating from LSE, I came to Warwick with a project aimed to investigate (1) how sociologists in some Asian countries negotiate their Western training in the study of locally embedded phenomenon, and (2) how has the process so-called ‘academic globalisation’ impacted their work.
This project echoes with various themes in my past. The thesis lies within the field of sociology of knowledge, a field that I was drawn to in my undergraduate year. It should have some solid epistemological discussion as grounding and implies some analysis of academic politics; both are themes I became interested in since I changed my major. And the project also reflects my constant concern about how Taiwan is related to the West, now discussed in the theoretical context of globalisation.
In a deeper level, this is also a study about how a group of elite intellectuals play their role in contemporary. How do they interpret their work? Was that serving to their ends and values? These are the issues I’ve been asking myself for years, and I am keen to hear their answers.
A PhD thesis is for me like a conjunction of time. It concludes some key elements of my past, and set out a future agenda, with a list of question to be answered.
Reference
Kim, U., Yang K .S. & Hwang K. K. (2006) Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context. New York: Springer.
Kuhn, T (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolution. 2nd. Ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Endnotes
[1] This article is aimed to be a reflection of my personal intellectual journey. Everything I described was included because it is considered relevant to the development of my academic interest and those choices I made. It was NOT my intention to argue for any of the statement, historical or sociological, described. So readers shall bear in mind the subjectivities of the paragraphs and excuse the author for not providing substantial citations or proof for the descriptions.
[2] Traditional Chinese culture has a four-tier class structure for classifying people: Shi, Nong, Gong, Shang, which means elite, intellectual farmer, worker and businessman respectively.
[3] I came across Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution in 1994 and absorbed his concept of paradigm as a conceptual tool in evaluating the development of different disciplines.
[4] I was then only allowed to transfer within the College of Science, which prevent me from considering any social scientific disciplines.
[5] Some psychologist always felt doubtful for the superficial imitation of the Western psychological research then and hailed for the need of ‘indigenous psychology,’ see Kim et al, 2006.
[6] In my high school days, we were still taught to call ourselves ‘China’ (officially named ‘Republic of China’) and the regime in mainland as ‘rebel government.’
[7] This is due to the fact that Taiwan was an US-ally during the cold war.
[8] In the 2000 Presidential Election, the pro-Chinese-identity Nationalist Party (a.k.a. Kuomingtang, or KMT) lost and transferred power to the pro-Taiwanese-identity Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). This ended KMT’s 51-year ruling since the end of Pacific War. See Entry ‘ROC presidential election, 2000’ on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROC_presidential_election,_2000, assessed on 17/10/06.
[9] In 2001, Taiwan suffered from its first-ever economic decline (GDP growth rate -2.17%), which resulted in a sharp increase in the unemployment rate (2.99% in 2000, 4.57% in 2001, 5.17% in 2002). See http://investintaiwan.nat.gov.tw/en/env/stats , assessed on 17/10/06.
[10] This is where Sociological Imagination takes place, see Mills, 1959.
Committing myself to a critical review of the academic activities of the sociologists in some Asian countries is by no means an accidental idea. Rather, this thesis reflects my ongoing self-inquiring of the role of intellectual in contemporary society, my concern about the Eastern-Western relations in the context of globalisation, and the interests of epistemological issues and academic politics I developed in my intellectual journey through the fields of chemistry, psychology and sociology. Each of these factors can be traced back to different stages of my life. But a water-shedding moment to start with would be the summer of 1993, when I defeated 140 competitors from 34 countries and won the Gold Medal of International Chemistry Olympia.
A Scholar-Wanna-Be Seeking His Field
Thirteen years from then, I can still recall the exhilaration in that dream-like summer. Flower ring on the airport, meeting Taiwan’s President, a large sum of scholarship and automatic admission to the Chemistry department in the most prestigious university in this island－all at once I seemed to achieve what many others could only dream of, and was on a way toward a bright future.
However, stepping down from the exciting height, what I felt was actually an unprecedented sense of lost. Having been encouraged to compete for either schools’ or country’s honour for years, I was finally allowed a chance to ask myself: am I really want to be a Chemist? Surely I want to become some kind of scholar. In traditional Chinese culture, becoming an elite intellectual has always been seen as the default goal for smart kids[2]. In fact, the Chinese name my parents chose for me has a pronunciation similar to the phrase ‘knowledgeable,’ and they’d told me to study for PhD when I was only six! I did incorporate this inking into my self-image, especially after a series of success boosted my confidence; but which field is for me? Furthering on my training in psychology is of course a sensible option. I did appreciate the beauty of the world that the knowledge of chemistry revealed to me; the emerging field of biochemical science also seemed a promising field. Yet whenever I stayed late in lab with bottles and devices, I still wondered: is that all my life would be?
Driven by curiosity to explore, I started to take courses from a wide spectrum. And soon I became convinced that, in shaping our life and future, humanity and social issues are far more important than pure science and technologies. I also found, compared with the well-established ‘paradigms[3]’ in chemistry, the less-settled nature of behavioral and social science sounds a greater challenge. So I changed my major to psychology[4].
Breaking up with Chemistry
Breaking up with the seemly promising career path in Chemistry evoked much doubts from my relative, friends and teachers. Some expressed a sense of pity; some accused me to be unrealistic and willful. And I can still recall how some Chemistry professors dismissed psychology as a ‘pseudo-science’ that won’t worth my talent.
At the age of 19 and still uncertain of many things, I was not ready to stand to argue with these high-profiling scholars. But this process of confrontation did leave some lasting marks in my mind:
First, it was the first time I started to ask why some ‘natural science’ like chemistry was (and may still be) seen as in some sense superior than psychology? In other words, I began to be aware of the interdisciplinary power structure and to feel doubtful.
Second, such doubt inevitably brought me to question and compare the different ‘nature’ of the two disciplines, such as their ends, their assumption of the world, and their ways of investigation, i.e. philosophical issues of ontology and epistemology.
Third, in a subtler, psychological level, it was like to be engaged in a life-long competition with another ‘possible me’ who continued to pursue the chemistry path. This may not be necessary from the stand point of psychological health, but it is this very anxiety for a justification of my decision that drove me along the way to look for ends higher than merely becoming a well-reputed scholar in university, and to question deeper about what values I would place as the axis of my life.
Doubts on Academia and the East-West Theme
Training in psychology didn’t answer the problems of values and ends directly, but it granted me discerning eyes for human mind and behaviour as well as skills to exert positive influences on others. Yes, I told myself this is what I am going to do－to be helper to others, and I did once consider pursuing advanced studies in social psychology or counseling training as path to this end.
However, I was halted later by more exposure to some local researches, because they seemed more like academic-jargon plays than genuine intellectual explorations. In particular, a large portion of these works seemed nothing but uncritical implantation of certain Western theoretical model on Taiwan that generated piles of ‘empirical’ data, which, from the eyes of a native resident here (me), makes little sense.
Disappointed and lost, I couldn’t help wonder: Must academic work be done by this way? Are scholars doing their job as the way they are supposed to? These questions brought me to reflect on the end and practices of academic research, again, but this time I went a bit further to ask how certain institutional characteristics of local academia (e.g., funding allocation, publication format) were influencing academic outputs, and that was my first encounter with sociology of knowledge.
In particular, I wondered how the existing modes of practices are related to the fact that psychology was a subject imported from the West[5]. This East-West thesis is no stranger for a child growing up in 1980s Taiwan. In school we were taught the disgraceful history of how China[6] and some other Asian countries was invaded by Western super powers in 19th centuries, while we are also taught how the West are nowadays symbols of the good, free, democratic, and modern world[7], as against to the bad communist world, which include our then enemy, communist China. Resentment (for what they’ve done) mixed with aspiration (for their modernity) and identity (we are on their side)－we as kids developed a fairy contradictory feelings of the West. And it was so natural that we place the tension of the relationship with the West as a central theme in any serious speculation about us.
Globalisation in Focus
With doubts of the academia reality I chose to join the ‘real world’ after graduating from university, first fulfilling the compulsory military service and later working as editor and marketing specialist for a leading publisher in Taiwan.
Within just a few years, I witnessed not a few tremendous changes in Taiwan. I saw the rise of cyber-biz along with the digital anxiety since 1998, I experienced Taiwan’s agony over diversified identities on 2000’s President Election[8], I witnessed the worst-ever economic setback in 2001[9], and I observed the turmoil and debates after 9-11. Each of these events affected the lives of many individual, and yet none of them can be adequately understood without something of greater scope (e.g. technology, national identity, global economy, international relations) is taken into account[10]. And all these issues seemed converge in one word: globalisation. To explore more on globalisation, I went to London School of Economics in 2002 studying for MSc in Sociology.
A Conjunction of Future and Past
Three years after graduating from LSE, I came to Warwick with a project aimed to investigate (1) how sociologists in some Asian countries negotiate their Western training in the study of locally embedded phenomenon, and (2) how has the process so-called ‘academic globalisation’ impacted their work.
This project echoes with various themes in my past. The thesis lies within the field of sociology of knowledge, a field that I was drawn to in my undergraduate year. It should have some solid epistemological discussion as grounding and implies some analysis of academic politics; both are themes I became interested in since I changed my major. And the project also reflects my constant concern about how Taiwan is related to the West, now discussed in the theoretical context of globalisation.
In a deeper level, this is also a study about how a group of elite intellectuals play their role in contemporary. How do they interpret their work? Was that serving to their ends and values? These are the issues I’ve been asking myself for years, and I am keen to hear their answers.
A PhD thesis is for me like a conjunction of time. It concludes some key elements of my past, and set out a future agenda, with a list of question to be answered.
Reference
Kim, U., Yang K .S. & Hwang K. K. (2006) Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context. New York: Springer.
Kuhn, T (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolution. 2nd. Ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Endnotes
[1] This article is aimed to be a reflection of my personal intellectual journey. Everything I described was included because it is considered relevant to the development of my academic interest and those choices I made. It was NOT my intention to argue for any of the statement, historical or sociological, described. So readers shall bear in mind the subjectivities of the paragraphs and excuse the author for not providing substantial citations or proof for the descriptions.
[2] Traditional Chinese culture has a four-tier class structure for classifying people: Shi, Nong, Gong, Shang, which means elite, intellectual farmer, worker and businessman respectively.
[3] I came across Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution in 1994 and absorbed his concept of paradigm as a conceptual tool in evaluating the development of different disciplines.
[4] I was then only allowed to transfer within the College of Science, which prevent me from considering any social scientific disciplines.
[5] Some psychologist always felt doubtful for the superficial imitation of the Western psychological research then and hailed for the need of ‘indigenous psychology,’ see Kim et al, 2006.
[6] In my high school days, we were still taught to call ourselves ‘China’ (officially named ‘Republic of China’) and the regime in mainland as ‘rebel government.’
[7] This is due to the fact that Taiwan was an US-ally during the cold war.
[8] In the 2000 Presidential Election, the pro-Chinese-identity Nationalist Party (a.k.a. Kuomingtang, or KMT) lost and transferred power to the pro-Taiwanese-identity Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). This ended KMT’s 51-year ruling since the end of Pacific War. See Entry ‘ROC presidential election, 2000’ on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROC_presidential_election,_2000, assessed on 17/10/06.
[9] In 2001, Taiwan suffered from its first-ever economic decline (GDP growth rate -2.17%), which resulted in a sharp increase in the unemployment rate (2.99% in 2000, 4.57% in 2001, 5.17% in 2002). See http://investintaiwan.nat.gov.tw/en/env/stats , assessed on 17/10/06.
[10] This is where Sociological Imagination takes place, see Mills, 1959.
Are There Communities in Cyberspace?
[Originally the assignment essay submitted for the course "Media, Technology and Eveyday Life" in LSE, 28/4/2003. Course convenor: Roger Silverstone]
Are there communities in cyberspace? The internet enthusiasts believe that the computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies promise a new way of creating communities; the skeptics dismiss the authenticity of ‘virtual communities.’ This question is plagued by the elusive notion of community, which reflects the intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-conceptualizing community. Identifying the inevitable subjective element in every definition of community, I found it a genuine aptitude not to impose any a priori criteria of community in studying the social life in cyberspace, but rather focusing on the CMC user’s subjective interpretation. Based on the empirical evidence available, I found: (a) CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life from which they can obtain a ‘sense of community’ (b) However, to claim that such community exist ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading. The cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. (c) The hope of regenerating communities through the internet is misplaced. The internet, though powerful a tool, has certain restrictions and brings mixed effect on our social life.
Introduction: Debate of the Communities in Cyberspace
“Cyberspace,” a term coined by W. Gibson (1984) in his science fiction Neuromancer and now understood as “where human interaction occurs over computer networks[1]”, suddenly kick into our daily vocabulary as the computer mediated communication (CMC) swept our lives in the past decade. Its potential impacts on our social life soon captured attention, and triggered the debates on whether there are authentic communities in cyberspace or not, and whether CMC are leading us toward a more accommodating or a more alienating world.
The optimists believe that CMC promise new ways of building human communities. They see the flourishing mailing lists, discussion groups, chat rooms, BBSs as new forms of the “third places” which Oldenburg (1989) claimed to be central to communities’ sociality. Rheingold (1993: 5), for instance, described the online social life with the term “virtual community,” which he defined as the “social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” Schuler (1996: 34) also claimed “computer technology…can play a positive role in rebuilding community.”
Apparently, what is achievable online will not be exactly the same as the traditional geographically- bounded communities, but as Shuler (1996) stated,
The old concept of community is obsolete in many ways and needs to be updated to meet today’s challenges. The old or “traditional” community was often exclusive, inflexible, isolated, unchanging, monolithic, and homogeneous. A new community needs to be fashioned from the remnants of the old (p.9).
Similarly, Roseanne Stone (1991) described that the virtual community, from her perspective, is “incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both ‘meet’ and ‘face’.” The paragraph written more a decade ago had became more plausible as applications like instant messengers, visual MUD (where one can see the avatars of other players) and video chat emerged in the past few years.
In the other hand, the skepticism of technologies’ capability in improving our life seems never cease since Heiddger’s critique of the “inauthentic existence” under technological and market domination. Some theorists, tried to re-examine the online social life with the criteria they believed essential for a community. For instance, Doheny-Farina (1996) argued,
A community is bound by place, which always includes complex social and environmental necessities. It is not something you can easily join. You can’t subscribe to a community as you subscribe to a discussion group on the net. (p.37)
She carried on to stress that a community must be lived, be intertwined with all the senses, and involve the “continuing, unplanned interactions between the same people for a long period of time (p.37).” Similarly, Calhoun (1998) used the criteria of density, multiplexity and autonomy to examine the relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology. He concluded that, to the most, they are merely manifestations of fostered “categorical identities” based on similar race, occupation or interests, and far from being truly communities.
So, how do we negotiate between the contradictory views? Logically, the question “are there communities in cyberspace” should be answered by examining what is achievable in cyberspace with the criteria of what is a community. I will discuss the later first.
The Concept of Community: A Historical Perspective
The term ‘community’ has an elusive meaning. At minimum, community could means “a collection of people who share something in common.[2]” But it often bears much deeper connotations, such as to “encompass all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion and continuity in time (Nisbet, 1967: 47).” Van Vliet and Burgers (1987) argue that a community contains “social interaction, a shared value system, and a shared symbol system” in its social, economic, political, and cultural realms. Calhoun (1998) proposed “density, multiplexity, and autonomy” as criteria for a community. As Fernback (1997:39) observed, the term community “seems readily definable to the general public but is indefinitely complex and amorphous in academic discourse… It has descriptive, normative, and ideological connotations.”
This “normative and ideological connotations” explain partly the difficulty of defining community. While community is often defined in objective terms of social structure and social interaction, each version of definition inevitably encompass a subjective element of interpreting an ideal state of how we live together. Furthermore, such interpretations are constantly challenged by the social shifts which impact the way in which people relate to each other. Here I will draw a short outline of how community had been conceptualized and discussed, which shows that the elusiveness of its concept reflects a century-long intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-conceptualizing community.
The sociological study of community can be traced back to late nineteenth century, when many sociologists used this concept with the dichotomies between pre-industrial and industrial, or rural and urban societies. In Gemeinshaft und Gesellshaft (1887), for instance, F. Tönnie equates Gesellshaft (community) to the rural, self-contained society that is united by kinship, shared values and a sense of belonging. For many sociologists then, communities were associated with all the assumed good characteristics of the rural, pre-industrial societies, and discussed as a contrastive alternative in their critique of the alienating modern societies[3]. Hence, the rediscovery of “traditional community” in 19th century can be seen as a reaction out of the anxiety of the social disintegration brought by industrialization and modernization.
The anxiety of the plausible decline and disintegration of traditional values and social orders has never ceased. It is often argued that the urbanization, the penetration of technology and market rationality, the rise of individualism and many other social shifts in modern Western societies has created generations of lonely, atomized citizens, and caused the “loss of community, identity, and morality” (Nisbet, 1953), “the disappearing social capital” (Putnam, 2000), and the “corrosion of individual character” (Sennett 1998). One intuitive response is to call for returning to traditional communities and restoring traditional values, as we can clearly see from Nisbet’s Quest of community in 1953 to Etzioni’s calling for rebuilding the “spirit of community” in 1993. Sampson (1999), in reviewing the community issue, noted “as we approach a new century and reflect on the wrenching social changes that have shaped our recent past, call for a return to community value are everywhere (p.241).
In the other hand, some respond to these challenges by re-conceptualizing community, usually by doing so to include some new forms of social solidarity that were not considered communities previously but are performing certain functions that are similar to the traditional communities. For instance, despite how community had been associated in the rural/urban dichotomies, Robert Park and his colleague at the University of Chicago started to use this term in studying urban life since 1920s.[4]” Another example was the shift from focusing on the geographical sense of community toward stressing more on its functional and process aspects in 1940s-60s, when social relations were becoming less geographically-confined as the communication and transportation means evolved. This conceptual shift is best reflected by Webber’s ‘community without propinquity’ (1963), with which he illustrate how friendships could be maintained at a distance and how community of a sort could emerge on the basis of professional grouping and complex organization as well as neighborhood.
Furthermore, after 1960s, as television swiftly spread into most western societies, the effect of mass-mediated experience in narrowing the difference between people’s experiences and creating new forms of communities also capture attention. McLuhan (1964) noted that the electronic communications technologies have essentially nullify the space and time distances so that we effectively live in a "global village." Anderson (1991), his “imagined community” thesis, also argued “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (p.7)”
Placed at the end of the historical context outlined above, the current debate about the authenticity of virtual communities is just one last round of the intellectual struggle of how community should be defined. While the optimists’ claims represent a new attempt of re-conceptualizing community to capture the emerging social solidarity online; the skepticism inherit the traditional resistance to technology penetration and the longing for the idyllic notion of the traditional community. From the discussion above, we can see that the word community has acquired a spectrum of meanings, which does not correspond to any specific form of social structure, but reflects various ways, at different levels, of conceptualizing an ideal state of how we live together. In other word, as I pointed out earlier, any form of conceptualization encompass a subjective element, which cannot be logically validated. Since so, I believe the genuine aptitude is not to choose any a priori criteria for community, but to explore how the CMC users actually experience and interpret their online social life, and whether they would call it a community, if so, in what sense. In this changing society, how the sense of community can be provided has been changed many times. Hence, while the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities never ceased, it is more realistic to re-conceptualize community as our social life patterns change. After all, the idyllic notion of community implied by the critics, as commented by Castell (2000: 387-388), “probably did not exist in rural society… has certainly disappeared in advanced, industrialized countries.”
Social Life in Cyberspace
A comprehensive assessment of how social life is lived online is destined to be overwhelmed by the fast progress and the enormous diversity of CMC applications. For instance, while we are still talking about text-based MUD, the visual-based MUD (such as Leaneage, which was launched in July, 2000 and now has 1.6 million members[5]) is already on its way. Moreover, internet does not provide one environment, but various environments. Table 1. presents some typical online environments involving social interaction, classified by its temporal aspect (synchronous/ asynchronous) and the number of users involved (interpersonal/multi-user). More aspects can be further added to differentiate internet environments, such as the norm and administration of one online group, its traffic flow and demographic composition, and the use of certain media formats (image, voice, video). Each combination of all the factors above has its own strength and limitation in terms of social interaction, and cannot be discussed in a general voice.
Nonetheless, the exiting literature already show sufficient evidence that some CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life, from which they can obtain ‘a sense of community.’ Rheingold (1993:3) is among the earliest writers who captured the richness of online social life. After participating in the WELL (a bulletin board system based on bay area, San Francisco) for seven years, He wrote, in cyberspace, people “exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk.” They “do just about everything people do in real life.”
Such richness of online social life is confirmed by Baym (2000:62), who, after studying the newsgroup rec,arts,tv,soap (r.a.t.s) for two years, wrote that “the thousands of people who have participated in r.a.t.s have created a dynamic and rich community filled with social nuance and emotion.” She also noted the emergence of group-specific identities, norms, relations and expressions with group-specific meanings:
“…participants in CMC develop forms of expression that enable them to communicate social information and to create and codify group-specific meanings, socially negotiate group-specific identities, form relationships that span from the playfully antagonistic to the deeply romantic… and create norms that serve to organise interaction and to maintain desirable social climates.”
Moreover, some participants do feel a sense of community and were willing to share personal experience in certain online group. In a survey of the participants on the mailing list WMST-L, Koreman and Wyatt (1996) found, while asked what is satisfying and useful about the group, aside from “information,” many participants also mentioned a “sense of community” and the “discussion of personal experience.” Turkle (1995) also demonstrated that MUD players could form a sense of community as well.
However, to claim that such communities exist ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading. Because the cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. In one way, internet is often used as a supplementary tool to enhance the already existing social relations or network in real life, such as the email among family members, friends, colleagues and schoolmates. As Calhoun (1998) argued, “CMC can supplement face-to-face contact … provide a powerful new channel for connections among people already linked by residence or engagement in a common organizational framework” (381)
In the other way, a considerable portion of the relations initiated online will be extended in to real life. For instance, “virtual community” advocate Rheingold also admit, WELL “felt like an authentic community… because it was grounded in my everyday physical world.” In a survey investigating the relations newsgroup subscribers build on the newsgroup, Parks and Floyd (1996) found that a high percentage of their respondent had contacted their online mates using means other than internet, such as telephone (35.3%), the postal service (28.4%), or face-to-face communication (33.3%). Baym (2000: 63) also observe that the “on-line groups are often woven into the fabric of off-line life rather than set in opposition to it. The evidence includes the pervasiveness of off-line contexts in on-line interaction and the movement of on-line relationships off-line.”
Finally, while CMC has certain strength and can be used constructively in our social life, it has certain restrictions, and the hope of regenerating communities solely by CMC is misplaced. One of the major reason for skepticism to rise was some "overheated language,” as Turkle (1996) noted, that "falls within a long tradition of American technological optimism” and “ tend to represent urban decay and class polarization as out-of-date formulations of a problem that could be solved with the right technology.’” Such hyper-optimists provided promising prophecies of CMC’s capability in promoting equality, democracy, civil society and so on. Yet these hopes are now challenged by the findings that CMC in effect strengthen the “hegemonic culture” (Fernback & Thompson, 1999), create a “new class” of the information- elite (Luke, 1993), caused the “compartmentalization of community” (Calhoun, 1998: 389) and “polarization” (Spears et al, 1990). Fernback and Thompson (1999), in contrasting the hopes placed on CMC with the reality, concluded: “virtual community is more indicative of an assemblage of people being "virtually" a community than being a real community in the nostalgic sense that advocates of CMC would seem to be endorsing.”
Conclusion
The debate of whether there exist community in the cyberspace is the latest round of a century-long intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities, and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-concept- ualising community. Recognizing the inevitable subjective element in every definition of community, I found it a genuine aptitude to focus on the CMC user’s interpretation instead of imposing any a priori criteria of community, but in studying the social life in cyberspace. Examining the empirical evidence from existing literature, I found: (a) CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life from which they can obtain a ‘sense of community’ (b) However, claiming such community as existing ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading, because the cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. (c) The hope of regenerating communities through the internet is misplaced. The internet, though powerful a tool, has certain restrictions and brings mixed effect on our social life.
Reference
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso.
Baym, N. K. (2000) ‘The Emergence of Community in Computer-mediated Communication.’ In S. G. Jones (ed.) Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-mediated Communication and Community. London: Sage, 35-68.
Calhoun, C. (1998) ‘Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.’ Sociological Inquiry, 68 (3) 373-397.
Doheny-Farina, S. (1996) The Wired Neighbourhood, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Etzioni, A. (1993) The Spirit of Community. New York : Crown Publishers.Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.’ Sociological Inquiry, 68 (3) 373-391.
Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1999) ‘Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?’ http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/VCcivil.html (April 2002)
Fowler, R. B. (1991) The Dance with Community: The Contemporary Debate in American Political Thought. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press.
Hillery, G. A. (1955) ‘Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement.’ Rural Sociology, 20 (2), 118.
Luke, T. (1993) ‘Community and ecology.’ In S. Walker (Ed.), Changing Community: The Graywolf Annual Ten (pp. 207-221). St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.
Nisbet, R. (1953) The Quest for Community Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nisbet, R. (1967) The Sociological Tradition. London : Heinemann.
Oldenburg, R. (1989) The Great Good Place, Paragon House.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Seligment, E. R. A. (ed.) (1930-35) Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: The Macmillan.
Spears, M., Russell, L., and Lee, S. (1990) ‘De-individuation and Group Polarization in Computer Mediated Communication.’ British Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 121-134
Turkle, S. (1996) ‘Virtuality and Its Discontents.’ The American Prospect vol. 7 no. 24.
Webber, M. M. (1963) ‘Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,’ in L. Wirigo (ed.) Cities and Space. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Endnotes
[1] Federal Communications Commission (1998) A Glossary of Telecommunications.
[2] Johnson, A (2000)The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, 2nd ed. Blackwell: London, p. 53
[3] Abercrombie, N et al. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, 4th ed. Penguin:London, p. 64
[4] Borrowing from bilogical ecology, Park defined community as “a population [of people, animal or plant], territorially organized, more or less completely rooted in the soil it occupies, its individual units living in a relationship of mutual interdependence that is symbiotic.” (Quoted by Coser, 1977:363. http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Park/PARKW6.HTML accessed 17/04/2003 )
[5] Gamania Site http://www.gamania.com/introduction/english/history.html
Are there communities in cyberspace? The internet enthusiasts believe that the computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies promise a new way of creating communities; the skeptics dismiss the authenticity of ‘virtual communities.’ This question is plagued by the elusive notion of community, which reflects the intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-conceptualizing community. Identifying the inevitable subjective element in every definition of community, I found it a genuine aptitude not to impose any a priori criteria of community in studying the social life in cyberspace, but rather focusing on the CMC user’s subjective interpretation. Based on the empirical evidence available, I found: (a) CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life from which they can obtain a ‘sense of community’ (b) However, to claim that such community exist ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading. The cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. (c) The hope of regenerating communities through the internet is misplaced. The internet, though powerful a tool, has certain restrictions and brings mixed effect on our social life.
Introduction: Debate of the Communities in Cyberspace
“Cyberspace,” a term coined by W. Gibson (1984) in his science fiction Neuromancer and now understood as “where human interaction occurs over computer networks[1]”, suddenly kick into our daily vocabulary as the computer mediated communication (CMC) swept our lives in the past decade. Its potential impacts on our social life soon captured attention, and triggered the debates on whether there are authentic communities in cyberspace or not, and whether CMC are leading us toward a more accommodating or a more alienating world.
The optimists believe that CMC promise new ways of building human communities. They see the flourishing mailing lists, discussion groups, chat rooms, BBSs as new forms of the “third places” which Oldenburg (1989) claimed to be central to communities’ sociality. Rheingold (1993: 5), for instance, described the online social life with the term “virtual community,” which he defined as the “social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” Schuler (1996: 34) also claimed “computer technology…can play a positive role in rebuilding community.”
Apparently, what is achievable online will not be exactly the same as the traditional geographically- bounded communities, but as Shuler (1996) stated,
The old concept of community is obsolete in many ways and needs to be updated to meet today’s challenges. The old or “traditional” community was often exclusive, inflexible, isolated, unchanging, monolithic, and homogeneous. A new community needs to be fashioned from the remnants of the old (p.9).
Similarly, Roseanne Stone (1991) described that the virtual community, from her perspective, is “incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both ‘meet’ and ‘face’.” The paragraph written more a decade ago had became more plausible as applications like instant messengers, visual MUD (where one can see the avatars of other players) and video chat emerged in the past few years.
In the other hand, the skepticism of technologies’ capability in improving our life seems never cease since Heiddger’s critique of the “inauthentic existence” under technological and market domination. Some theorists, tried to re-examine the online social life with the criteria they believed essential for a community. For instance, Doheny-Farina (1996) argued,
A community is bound by place, which always includes complex social and environmental necessities. It is not something you can easily join. You can’t subscribe to a community as you subscribe to a discussion group on the net. (p.37)
She carried on to stress that a community must be lived, be intertwined with all the senses, and involve the “continuing, unplanned interactions between the same people for a long period of time (p.37).” Similarly, Calhoun (1998) used the criteria of density, multiplexity and autonomy to examine the relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology. He concluded that, to the most, they are merely manifestations of fostered “categorical identities” based on similar race, occupation or interests, and far from being truly communities.
So, how do we negotiate between the contradictory views? Logically, the question “are there communities in cyberspace” should be answered by examining what is achievable in cyberspace with the criteria of what is a community. I will discuss the later first.
The Concept of Community: A Historical Perspective
The term ‘community’ has an elusive meaning. At minimum, community could means “a collection of people who share something in common.[2]” But it often bears much deeper connotations, such as to “encompass all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion and continuity in time (Nisbet, 1967: 47).” Van Vliet and Burgers (1987) argue that a community contains “social interaction, a shared value system, and a shared symbol system” in its social, economic, political, and cultural realms. Calhoun (1998) proposed “density, multiplexity, and autonomy” as criteria for a community. As Fernback (1997:39) observed, the term community “seems readily definable to the general public but is indefinitely complex and amorphous in academic discourse… It has descriptive, normative, and ideological connotations.”
This “normative and ideological connotations” explain partly the difficulty of defining community. While community is often defined in objective terms of social structure and social interaction, each version of definition inevitably encompass a subjective element of interpreting an ideal state of how we live together. Furthermore, such interpretations are constantly challenged by the social shifts which impact the way in which people relate to each other. Here I will draw a short outline of how community had been conceptualized and discussed, which shows that the elusiveness of its concept reflects a century-long intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-conceptualizing community.
The sociological study of community can be traced back to late nineteenth century, when many sociologists used this concept with the dichotomies between pre-industrial and industrial, or rural and urban societies. In Gemeinshaft und Gesellshaft (1887), for instance, F. Tönnie equates Gesellshaft (community) to the rural, self-contained society that is united by kinship, shared values and a sense of belonging. For many sociologists then, communities were associated with all the assumed good characteristics of the rural, pre-industrial societies, and discussed as a contrastive alternative in their critique of the alienating modern societies[3]. Hence, the rediscovery of “traditional community” in 19th century can be seen as a reaction out of the anxiety of the social disintegration brought by industrialization and modernization.
The anxiety of the plausible decline and disintegration of traditional values and social orders has never ceased. It is often argued that the urbanization, the penetration of technology and market rationality, the rise of individualism and many other social shifts in modern Western societies has created generations of lonely, atomized citizens, and caused the “loss of community, identity, and morality” (Nisbet, 1953), “the disappearing social capital” (Putnam, 2000), and the “corrosion of individual character” (Sennett 1998). One intuitive response is to call for returning to traditional communities and restoring traditional values, as we can clearly see from Nisbet’s Quest of community in 1953 to Etzioni’s calling for rebuilding the “spirit of community” in 1993. Sampson (1999), in reviewing the community issue, noted “as we approach a new century and reflect on the wrenching social changes that have shaped our recent past, call for a return to community value are everywhere (p.241).
In the other hand, some respond to these challenges by re-conceptualizing community, usually by doing so to include some new forms of social solidarity that were not considered communities previously but are performing certain functions that are similar to the traditional communities. For instance, despite how community had been associated in the rural/urban dichotomies, Robert Park and his colleague at the University of Chicago started to use this term in studying urban life since 1920s.[4]” Another example was the shift from focusing on the geographical sense of community toward stressing more on its functional and process aspects in 1940s-60s, when social relations were becoming less geographically-confined as the communication and transportation means evolved. This conceptual shift is best reflected by Webber’s ‘community without propinquity’ (1963), with which he illustrate how friendships could be maintained at a distance and how community of a sort could emerge on the basis of professional grouping and complex organization as well as neighborhood.
Furthermore, after 1960s, as television swiftly spread into most western societies, the effect of mass-mediated experience in narrowing the difference between people’s experiences and creating new forms of communities also capture attention. McLuhan (1964) noted that the electronic communications technologies have essentially nullify the space and time distances so that we effectively live in a "global village." Anderson (1991), his “imagined community” thesis, also argued “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (p.7)”
Placed at the end of the historical context outlined above, the current debate about the authenticity of virtual communities is just one last round of the intellectual struggle of how community should be defined. While the optimists’ claims represent a new attempt of re-conceptualizing community to capture the emerging social solidarity online; the skepticism inherit the traditional resistance to technology penetration and the longing for the idyllic notion of the traditional community. From the discussion above, we can see that the word community has acquired a spectrum of meanings, which does not correspond to any specific form of social structure, but reflects various ways, at different levels, of conceptualizing an ideal state of how we live together. In other word, as I pointed out earlier, any form of conceptualization encompass a subjective element, which cannot be logically validated. Since so, I believe the genuine aptitude is not to choose any a priori criteria for community, but to explore how the CMC users actually experience and interpret their online social life, and whether they would call it a community, if so, in what sense. In this changing society, how the sense of community can be provided has been changed many times. Hence, while the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities never ceased, it is more realistic to re-conceptualize community as our social life patterns change. After all, the idyllic notion of community implied by the critics, as commented by Castell (2000: 387-388), “probably did not exist in rural society… has certainly disappeared in advanced, industrialized countries.”
Social Life in Cyberspace
A comprehensive assessment of how social life is lived online is destined to be overwhelmed by the fast progress and the enormous diversity of CMC applications. For instance, while we are still talking about text-based MUD, the visual-based MUD (such as Leaneage, which was launched in July, 2000 and now has 1.6 million members[5]) is already on its way. Moreover, internet does not provide one environment, but various environments. Table 1. presents some typical online environments involving social interaction, classified by its temporal aspect (synchronous/ asynchronous) and the number of users involved (interpersonal/multi-user). More aspects can be further added to differentiate internet environments, such as the norm and administration of one online group, its traffic flow and demographic composition, and the use of certain media formats (image, voice, video). Each combination of all the factors above has its own strength and limitation in terms of social interaction, and cannot be discussed in a general voice.
Nonetheless, the exiting literature already show sufficient evidence that some CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life, from which they can obtain ‘a sense of community.’ Rheingold (1993:3) is among the earliest writers who captured the richness of online social life. After participating in the WELL (a bulletin board system based on bay area, San Francisco) for seven years, He wrote, in cyberspace, people “exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk.” They “do just about everything people do in real life.”Such richness of online social life is confirmed by Baym (2000:62), who, after studying the newsgroup rec,arts,tv,soap (r.a.t.s) for two years, wrote that “the thousands of people who have participated in r.a.t.s have created a dynamic and rich community filled with social nuance and emotion.” She also noted the emergence of group-specific identities, norms, relations and expressions with group-specific meanings:
“…participants in CMC develop forms of expression that enable them to communicate social information and to create and codify group-specific meanings, socially negotiate group-specific identities, form relationships that span from the playfully antagonistic to the deeply romantic… and create norms that serve to organise interaction and to maintain desirable social climates.”
Moreover, some participants do feel a sense of community and were willing to share personal experience in certain online group. In a survey of the participants on the mailing list WMST-L, Koreman and Wyatt (1996) found, while asked what is satisfying and useful about the group, aside from “information,” many participants also mentioned a “sense of community” and the “discussion of personal experience.” Turkle (1995) also demonstrated that MUD players could form a sense of community as well.
However, to claim that such communities exist ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading. Because the cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. In one way, internet is often used as a supplementary tool to enhance the already existing social relations or network in real life, such as the email among family members, friends, colleagues and schoolmates. As Calhoun (1998) argued, “CMC can supplement face-to-face contact … provide a powerful new channel for connections among people already linked by residence or engagement in a common organizational framework” (381)
In the other way, a considerable portion of the relations initiated online will be extended in to real life. For instance, “virtual community” advocate Rheingold also admit, WELL “felt like an authentic community… because it was grounded in my everyday physical world.” In a survey investigating the relations newsgroup subscribers build on the newsgroup, Parks and Floyd (1996) found that a high percentage of their respondent had contacted their online mates using means other than internet, such as telephone (35.3%), the postal service (28.4%), or face-to-face communication (33.3%). Baym (2000: 63) also observe that the “on-line groups are often woven into the fabric of off-line life rather than set in opposition to it. The evidence includes the pervasiveness of off-line contexts in on-line interaction and the movement of on-line relationships off-line.”
Finally, while CMC has certain strength and can be used constructively in our social life, it has certain restrictions, and the hope of regenerating communities solely by CMC is misplaced. One of the major reason for skepticism to rise was some "overheated language,” as Turkle (1996) noted, that "falls within a long tradition of American technological optimism” and “ tend to represent urban decay and class polarization as out-of-date formulations of a problem that could be solved with the right technology.’” Such hyper-optimists provided promising prophecies of CMC’s capability in promoting equality, democracy, civil society and so on. Yet these hopes are now challenged by the findings that CMC in effect strengthen the “hegemonic culture” (Fernback & Thompson, 1999), create a “new class” of the information- elite (Luke, 1993), caused the “compartmentalization of community” (Calhoun, 1998: 389) and “polarization” (Spears et al, 1990). Fernback and Thompson (1999), in contrasting the hopes placed on CMC with the reality, concluded: “virtual community is more indicative of an assemblage of people being "virtually" a community than being a real community in the nostalgic sense that advocates of CMC would seem to be endorsing.”
Conclusion
The debate of whether there exist community in the cyberspace is the latest round of a century-long intellectual struggle between the nostalgic calling for returning to traditional communities, and the attempts to acknowledge new forms of social solidarity by re-concept- ualising community. Recognizing the inevitable subjective element in every definition of community, I found it a genuine aptitude to focus on the CMC user’s interpretation instead of imposing any a priori criteria of community, but in studying the social life in cyberspace. Examining the empirical evidence from existing literature, I found: (a) CMC users can indeed use this medium constructively in maintaining some sort of social life from which they can obtain a ‘sense of community’ (b) However, claiming such community as existing ‘in cyberspace’ is misleading, because the cyberspace does not exist as a distinct, separate realm from the real life, but forms a complementary relation with the later, and most social groups formed or maintained with the aid of CMC seem to transgress the boundary between the two. (c) The hope of regenerating communities through the internet is misplaced. The internet, though powerful a tool, has certain restrictions and brings mixed effect on our social life.
Reference
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso.
Baym, N. K. (2000) ‘The Emergence of Community in Computer-mediated Communication.’ In S. G. Jones (ed.) Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-mediated Communication and Community. London: Sage, 35-68.
Calhoun, C. (1998) ‘Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.’ Sociological Inquiry, 68 (3) 373-397.
Doheny-Farina, S. (1996) The Wired Neighbourhood, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Etzioni, A. (1993) The Spirit of Community. New York : Crown Publishers.Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.’ Sociological Inquiry, 68 (3) 373-391.
Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1999) ‘Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?’ http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/VCcivil.html (April 2002)
Fowler, R. B. (1991) The Dance with Community: The Contemporary Debate in American Political Thought. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press.
Hillery, G. A. (1955) ‘Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement.’ Rural Sociology, 20 (2), 118.
Luke, T. (1993) ‘Community and ecology.’ In S. Walker (Ed.), Changing Community: The Graywolf Annual Ten (pp. 207-221). St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press.
Nisbet, R. (1953) The Quest for Community Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nisbet, R. (1967) The Sociological Tradition. London : Heinemann.
Oldenburg, R. (1989) The Great Good Place, Paragon House.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Seligment, E. R. A. (ed.) (1930-35) Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: The Macmillan.
Spears, M., Russell, L., and Lee, S. (1990) ‘De-individuation and Group Polarization in Computer Mediated Communication.’ British Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 121-134
Turkle, S. (1996) ‘Virtuality and Its Discontents.’ The American Prospect vol. 7 no. 24.
Webber, M. M. (1963) ‘Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,’ in L. Wirigo (ed.) Cities and Space. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Endnotes
[1] Federal Communications Commission (1998) A Glossary of Telecommunications.
[2] Johnson, A (2000)The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, 2nd ed. Blackwell: London, p. 53
[3] Abercrombie, N et al. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, 4th ed. Penguin:London, p. 64
[4] Borrowing from bilogical ecology, Park defined community as “a population [of people, animal or plant], territorially organized, more or less completely rooted in the soil it occupies, its individual units living in a relationship of mutual interdependence that is symbiotic.” (Quoted by Coser, 1977:363. http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Park/PARKW6.HTML accessed 17/04/2003 )
[5] Gamania Site http://www.gamania.com/introduction/english/history.html
How Do the Media Contribute to Changes in Time and Space?
[originally assignment essay submitted for course "Media and Globalisaiton" in LSE, 28/4/2003]
It 2:30 in the morning, lying back in my bed with laptop on my knee, I link to the library site to renew my book and download some journal articles. Meanwhile, I open another window to see the latest new about SARS[1] from a ‘local’ newspaper in Taiwan. Suddenly Pansy sends me a greeting via MSN messenger[2]. She shortly described the tense sense in Beijing and I share my feelings with her. We both feel we are witnessing an important passage of history. Soon after, Vika and Chi-chen also show up (as represented by the little blue head on MSN panel). I know that Vika just arrived her office in Taipei and Chi-chen returned home in Los Angles. I can see them and a dozen of other friends whenever I get online, yet I only talk with some of them occasionally. It just seems so easy to chat anytime that I see little reason to chat at any given time.
This passage of my life, contrasted with the past, illustrates some implications of how a new form of media, the internet, is redefining the temporality and spatiality as I conceive them. In this essay, I will start from these personal experiences; relate them to the existing literature for a critical discussion of how the media in general are re-shaping the way we conceive and experience time and space. Three themes will be explored: (1) the sense of shrinking distance and the dissociation of social relations from physical place, (2) the blurred boundary between public and private and the lost traditional identities of time and space, and (3) the mediated identities of time and space. In general, I found most theorizations are generalized in a level too abstract and can only capture a partial picture of the changing landscape of time and space. The media, while restructuring the old reference frame of time and space in various ways, also provide a complicated set of new frames over-layering on the old ones, with which we may construct our conception and experience of time and space in diverse ways.
Before entering further discussions, some clarification of the key concepts will be helpful. First, media, as discussed here, refers to the means of communication through which we experience the world beyond our immediate reach, which include the television, radio, newspaper, internet, phones and various personal communication devices. While money, language and power had been discussed as “circulating media” by Parson and Luhmann (Giddens, 1990:23), their implications are beyond the scope of this essay. Second, while the word “time” and “space” usually evoke the impression of the abstract, absolute dimensions of the physical world, here, apparently, they are discussed as social constructs, referring to our conceptions and experiences of them. Third, time and space are two distinctive aspects of our life, but they actually share much in common. As Bauman (2000) noted, “‘Far’ and ‘long’, just like ‘near’ and ‘soon’, used to mean nearly the same: just how much, or how little effort would it take for a human being to span a certain distance.” It also makes sense to regard ‘weekend time’ as a kind of ‘private space.’ Hence, for the reason of brevity, I will discuss “time and space” collectively while addressing the implications that are relevant to both.
The Sense of Shrinking Distance in Time and Space
In his fantastic novel Equality, 1897, Edward Bellamy envisioned a world in which the electronic connection had made the physical distance no longer a barrier for experiencing the world with your eyes and ears. He wrote:
“You stay at home and send your eyes and ears abroad for you. Wherever the electric connection is carried … be it the mid-air balloon or mid-ocean float of the weather watchman, or the ice-crushed hut of the polar observer… it is possible in slippers and dressing gown for the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainments given that day in every city of the earth” (347-8, quoted in Marvin, 1988:200)
This paragraph reflects the aspiration we once had, or still have, to conquer the restriction of physical distance through the media technology.
One century later, with the invention of radio, telephone, television, internet, and various forms of electronic devices the vision imagined by Bellamy had mostly come true. The distance we need to travel and the time I need to spend for doing various things were dramatically reduced. Now, I can “send my eyes and ears” to see the latest news in distant countries, I can also talk with friends who is physically remote, renew my books without spending £2 and two hours on the road, and do many things that were previously unachievable without physical presence. Meyrowitz (1985:116) argued that the telegraph, the first widely adopted means of electronic media, eroded the “informational differences between different places” and made the “[p]hysical distance as a social barrier… to be bypassed through the shortening of communication ‘distance.’” This remark is applicable to all the electronic communication means developed in the last century.
The “bypassing of the physical distance” has two implications. First, it creates a sense of shrinking distance and a speeding-up of life pace. The media provide an alternative, easier path for accessing a huge amount of information and options that were previously remote, as noted by McLuhan (1967) in his description of the “global village.” And this effect, combined with the rationale of capitalism, the logic of competition, leads to a sense of speeding-up of life pace. The two effects led Harvey (1989) to coined the phrase “time-space compression,” because, he wrote, “a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us (240).”
Second, the bypassing of the physical distance enables us to manage our social relations in a less geographically bounded way. It’s argued to have caused the “disembedding… the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction” (Giddens, 1990:21) and “the dissociation of physical place and the social ‘place’ ” (Meyrowitz 1985:115). These notions capture some aspects of the changing experience of time and space. In my case, for instance, part of my social relation with school library (renewing books and copying some articles) is “lifted out” from the conventional context of going to the library, and now managed in a “social place” that is dissociated from any physical place, i.e., the library website. Besides, I also keep contact with most of my friends in such “dissociated social place,” which relies in “the notional environment within which electronic communication occurs,[3]” namely the cyberspace. Whenever I get online and see the little blue heads on my MSN panel (knowing that they can see me as well if they are by the screen), I do have a feeling of showing up in a public “space.” If I log into a local BBS, I can even get a more intimate, cozy feeling, which is well-captured by Rheingold’s (1993) notion of “virtual community.”
However, while the notions of “disembedding,” “time-space compression,” or “global village” capture some aspect of my experience, the impression of a uniformly shrinking world is just misleading. First, my experience as a highly connected is far from an experience shared by all. Just take the internet access as example: in 2000, there were 252.5 internet hosts per one thousand population in United States, while in India the same statistic was only 0.02[4]. As Silverstone (1999) pointed out, “[t]hose who talk of space-time distanciation, or space-time compression, as the common denominator of the global…offer too great an abstraction. The disembedding…is by no means, even now, a uniform global experience. (p.109)”
Second, for those who are “highly connected”, the different parts of the world are neither equally represented on the media network. The whole discussion around “media imperialism” (e.g., see Boyd-Barrett, 1977) should reminds us that different countries are unequally presented in the “mediascape,” in Appadurai’s (1990) term. And the “global city” discussed by Sassen (1991) are also expected to be more accessible on the media than the backwater little towns in nearby area.
Finally, the sense of distance between an individual and one place may be plural. Take my relation with the library as an example, while I can renew my books online, I still go to the real library to borrow and return books. What I feel is actually the coexistence of “two path,” one is more distant but allows a full interaction with the library, the other permit only a partial interaction but is just a mouse click away. Hence the shortened sense of distance does not replace the old one completely, but just, in Ferguson’s (1993) expression, “overlay” on it.
Lost Traditional Identities of Time and Space
“2:30 in the morning, laying back in my bed,” I am supposed to be spending my most private time at my most private space, to be at home. Home, described by Silverstone (1999:89), is “a place of shelter, a facilitating as well as an oppressive place. It always set against the public, the impersonal, the outside, the unfamiliar…” However, I am still engaged in the public discourse as I read the news and talk with friends through the screen, the new form of “door” that “allow us to see and to reach beyond the limits of the physical space of the house” (Silverstone, 1999: 91). Scannel (1988:17), studying the temporality of radio broadcasting, noted that “[b]roadcasts unobtrusively stitched together the private and the public spheres in a whole new range of contexts.” Here, I witness the same effect to a greater extend. The role of my bedroom as private space and the nighttime as private time are both eroded. The use of media blurred the boundary between the public and the private time and space.
This blurred boundary between the public and the private highlights a more general concern over the lost identities of time and space. Meyrowitz (1985:125), observing that the “[t]elevision, radio, and telephone turn once private places into more public ones … [and] car stereos, wristwatch televisions, and personal sound systems such as the Sony ‘Walkman’ make public spaces private,” concluded that the media destroy the specialness of place and time. He further remarked, “[t]hrough such media, what is happening almost anywhere can be happening wherever we are. Yet when we are everywhere, we are also no place in particular.”
Relph’s (1976) discussions of “placelessness” and Augé’s (1995) “non-place” thesis reflect similar concerns, though from different perspectives. Relph (1976:92), focusing on how media affect place construction, argued that the mass media were causing a “growing uniformity of landscape” and “a lessening of places” by transmitting a standardized taste and fashion. Augé’s (1995: 77) took “identity, history and relations” as key criteria for “place” and concluded that the look-alike landscape, e.g., fast-food stores, coffee shops, supermarkets, or airport, are “non-place.” These views in fact reflect the other side of the “disembedding” process discussed previously. While social situations are being dissociated from physical places, and social relations are being “lifted out” from local contexts, the importance of a given geographical location is hence decreased.
Regarding time, the ambiguity of contemporary temporarily is well captured by Castell’s (1996: 494) notion of “timeless time.” He proposed this idea to reflect the various “systemic perturbations in the sequential order of phenomenon” induced by the “informa- tional paradigm and network society.” This perturbation, according to him, may take the form of “compressing the occurrence of phenomena, aiming at instaneity, or else by introducing random discontinuity in the sequence.” He used the examples of split-second capital transaction, flex-time enterprise, the blurring of the life cycle and so on to give this argument a strong support. Although Castell’s analysis relates to a broad range of issues, the role of media in this analysis cannot be more central. While the aspects of “compression and instaneity” can be understood following our previous discussion about the “speeding up,” the “random discontinuity,” or in the more appealing term, “flexibility”, in many ways, is also enabled through the development of media.
Yet, does time and space really lose its specialness? Not really. As we will elaborate next, media are in effect “create” some forms of specialness or identities of time and space.
Mediated Identities of Time and Space
I believe that I will always remember this turbulent April, which is “highlighted” by the war on Iraq and SARS. I feel emotionally touched and I talk with my friends sharing my feelings. Yet, all the exposures I have with the war and SARS are mediated, as far as I don’t get infected. In a way, it is through media that I feel the “intensity of meaning” of this specific period time. Similar examples are just abundant, to name few: celebrating the new millennium’s eve, World Cup, 9-11, the death ceremony of Diana and so on. Dayan and Katz (1992:196-7) noted how certain public ceremonies, nowadays, are broadcasted and shared by many: “[a] consequence of the new model of public ceremony is that the whole of a population is allowed – and expected – to attend…. All those within reach of a television set are simultaneously and equally exposed, and they share the knowledge that everybody else is too… ” Such a “media event” is broadcasted to many who do not have face-to-face contact with each other in their real life, marking a specific period of time with intense meaning.
If we take a broader scope, some forms of electronic media that used to dominate, such as radio, or still dominate, such as television, have all been demonstrated to be influential in “disciplining” our temporality. Scannel (1988:17, italic added) noted that in 1920-30s, “BBC became perhaps the central agent of the national culture as the calendrical role of broadcas- ting; this cyclical reproduction, year in year out, of an orderly and regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations…that marked the unfolding of the broadcast year.” Also, Mellencamp (1990: 240) described US network television as “disciplinary time machine” because “[t]he hours, days, and television seasons are seriated, scheduled, and traded in ten-second increments modeled on the modern work day – day time, prime time, late night, or weekend.” It is these media events, and the shared temporality and meaning they create, that help create the kind of “imagined community” argued by Anderson (1991).
Similarly, while the media destroy the traditional identities of many places through promoting “uniformity of landscape,” they also play the crucial roles in how certain places are represented, perceived, and imagined, and in effect help creating or affirming the identities of these places. Harvey (1993) used the example of New York Time Square to illustrate how the representation (as 'symbolic place') and imagination of one place can actually create a sense of place identity and have significant material consequence. In my personal experience, I consume media to construct my imagination of London before coming here; now, I use the internet to nourish my emotional attachment with my hometown.
Moreover, while Relph and Augé criticized the look-alike landscape as “placeless” or “non-place,” we must not forget the very reason for such look-alike places to emerge – to provide those who migrate often a sense of familiarity in an unfamiliar land[5] – still implies a sense of “place identity,” though in a more symbolic, less geographically-bounded way. Crang (1998:103) clarified the meaning of place as it “provide an anchor of shared experiences between people and community over time.” In a traditional society, such a place is surely a geographically bounded one, which is “relational, historical and concerned with identity,” in Augé’s criteria. Yet in contemporary society, while the communities in the traditional sense are replaced by the “community without propinquity” (Webber, 1963) or “ personal community” of “individual’s social network” (Wellman and Gulia, 1999), such an “anchor of shared experience” is no longer necessarily a definite geographical locale, but could be some common elements in the life of the people involved in the new forms of community, for instance, Starbucks, Tesco, and some of the “non-places” Augé claimed. As Massey (1991) pointed out, “places should no longer be seen internally homogenous, bounded area, but as ‘spaces of interaction.’”
Contrasting the arguments presented above, either the “placelesness” or “mediated place construction,” “timeless time” or “disciplinary time machine,” only captures one facet of the complicated picture of how media reshape our conception and experiences of time and space. While the media blur the boundary between the private and the public, cause the “uniformity in landscape” which erode traditional place identities, and tumble the old sense of time, they are also “supplying new definitions of, and imperatives for, time and space (Ferguson, 1993:170).” In sum, the media provide a diverse set of new frames of time and space, over-layering on the old ones, with which we may construct our conception and experience of time and space in diverse ways.
Reference
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London: Verso.
Appadurai, A. (1990) 'Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, pp. 1-23 in Public Culture, Vol. 2, No 2.
Bauman, Z. (2000) ‘Time and Space Reunited’, pp. 171–185 in Time and Society 9(2/3) London: Sage
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell
Crang, M. (1998) Cultural Geograph. London : Routledge.
Dayan, D. and Katz E. (1992) Media Events; The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ferguson, M. (1993) 'Electronic Media and Redefining of Time and Space’, pp. 152-172 in M. Ferguson (ed) Public Communication. The New Imperatives. London: Sage.
Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harvey, D. (1989) 'From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity’, pp. 3-29 in J. Bird et al (eds.) Mapping the Futures. Local Culture, Global Change. London: Routledge.
Harvey, D (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marvin, C. (1988) When Old Technologies Were New. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mellencamp, P. (1990) ‘TV Time and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television,’ in Mellencamp, P. (ed.) Logics of Television. London: British Film Institute.
Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion Ltd
Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City. London: Princeton University Press
Scannel, P. (1988) ‘Radio Times: the Temporal Arrangements of Broadcasting in the Modern World,’ in Drummond, P. and Paterson, R. (eds.) Television and Its Audience: International Perspectives. London: British Film Institute.
Silverstone, R. (1999) Why Study the Media. London: Sage.
Webber, M. M. (1963) “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,” in L. Wirigo (ed.) Cities and Space. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wellman, B. and Gulia, M. (1999) ‘Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities’, pp. 331-366 in Barry Wellman (eds.) Network in the Global Village. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Endnotes
[1] Serious Acute Respiratory Syndrome, a sickness now plagued Asia.
[2] A popular instant messenger software
[3] Oxford English Dictionary, entry “cyberspace.”
[4] Internet Software Consortium, 2000
[5] This purpose is evident in discussions about CIS (company identification system ) in the business literatures.
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