Lecture: Urban Communitys vs Network Villages

I found this lecture really interesting but a little hard to commentate on. Mostly because I agree and am really fascinated with the concepts.

Obake and I were discussing this and a couple of issues came up. One was the question of whether we've ever lived in 'hobbiton' villages (small rural communities where everyone knows everyone and everyone's intimately involved in each others lives). I think on one hand it's a myth developed and promoted by nineteenth century writers like Thomas Hardy and George Elliot, and then by the Arts and Crafts movement at the turn of the twentieth century. An idealised place that the industrial revolution ripped from the bosom of mankind. A lot of the modern day reinactors and the community movements of the sixties subscribe to this idea of returning to an idealised pre-industrial village lifestyle. Fortunately we've also got the post-modernist historians arguing that it wasn't quite like that. Yes the villages were small and dependant on each other, but they were also dependant on the whims of the lords or gentry. And these villages tended to be very insular and demanding of particular behaviours. See The Burning Times. This was mentioned during our lecture in relation to Wellman's discussions about Glocalisation.

The network society, however is really interesting in its own right. Particularly in relationship to the way that technology allows us to become 'technosocial' beings. We use the technology to facilitate our relationships - there's a lot of scholarship on this but for the point of this discussion I'll just say that I agree and go on from there.

So what I left the lecture thinking about was two things: one is how my life actually fits in with the network model and two how can I use the technology to enhance these networks. My eyes lit up at the idea of being able to use bluetooth networks to message my friends as we wander through town. I'm a bit of a social director for our crew, and it's definitely an environment where we try (and from the feedback) to be inclusive - if you can make it to something, fantastic, if you can't, maybe we'll see you next time. We've got an event coming up for which I'll enable the greater network (beyond the crew that usually come to everything) and it'll all be done via messanger, lj and email. We have two people we actually have to ring because the sad people don't have everyday internet. We want community - we want a social environment and a sense of belonging, but we're also all very independent people with lives that exist outside of the network as well as in it. A network village works so much better for us than an insular localised village. But then I'm probably a product of my generation (or the next).

And as an aside, one of the things that I'm kind of thinking about for my briz.au blog is about 'the Brisbane Effect' - the two degrees of separation and I think that fits very well into this idea of networks - that Brisbane exists in a kind of network state where we're all connected socially through a network. Hmmm. My parents raised me with the motto 'network, network, network' and it's catching up to us 25 years later *grin*.

I really want to do some more work on these concepts and how they fit both into a net-enhanced lifestyle and into our lives (I refuse to use 'real life' as if there's a separation between my life 'on the net' and off it - there isn't). But not now, am sick with flu and waiting for some of my 'net-enabled' friends to come round to watch Bollywood flicks as a going away for our friend who's blogging her journey to Europe for 10 weeks for us on lj.