Mary’s soci 350 introduction – brain dump
What is the internet? – what a tangled web we weave
Information Superhighway Cyber Society
The Internet viewed as a super database The internet facilitating the emergence of virtual society/ies
Facilitating access to people; groups; organisations for retrieving existing information- people perceived as sources of information Facilitating access to people; groups; organisations for observing people driven processes/ interactions where information is created and shared
People; groups; organisations perceived as entities where information is stored
People; groups; organisations perceived as networks generating, constructing and relying mutual understandings
Studies of the internet in this perception tends to investigate its content
(Web Content mining – as seen in Kosala 2000) Studies of the internet in this perception tends to investigate its structure to identify links and relations leading to networks and social structures
(Web Structure mining as seen in Kosala2000)
Some historical facts – Berners- Lee, Licklider ….
The most important thing about the Internet is interactions – not only of people, but of content- the internet as its name suggests is a web. It has a web structure and a web way of interacting behaving representing, and delivering. This applies to humans as well as content.
Examples of web of people – social networks,
Example of web of content
How ubiquitous is it in our lives? What do we include in this when we say our lives,
The internet is changing the way we relate to ‘time’ , place, ourselves and others
My note;
Time is linear- on the internet time is contextual reference ( we don’t relate to something because it is being discussed now- in our physical time , but because we are connected to a specific context being discussed online , this discussion could take place on and off at different periods of our physical time, but online we shall be creating a coherent continuing context, and content. This context could appear to have been created as a unit or it can maintain a perpetuum mobile constantly evolving and drawing on emerging contextual references. These references are not necessarily hierarchical, and rather resemble a tangled web. These tangled webs are the mirrors of our minds, because the human mind is not a linear machine.
End of my note.
Our online identity and relations to others- because of the change in the way we refer to ourselves online, our relation to others change. Furthermore, because of the network, or web structures, notions of hierarchy, power, and control take a different meaning than those we are accustomed in the physical world.
So , the Internet is a super web of interaction, references and links, affecting people and their content, therefore there is no Internet super highway and a cyber society, like I have illustrated in the table above, but rather a cyber web of humans and artefacts.
The internet is a place where we can link, communicate, and by doing so create a context, a social, a temporal, a contextual environment created solely by the power of relations ( of people , artefacts, people and artefacts people and people.)
From print to Hypertext
The internet allows us to think in nonlinear forms, which is a great leap for our long tradition of being a ‘literate society’(see Postman and McLuhan), we are moving away from this linear based culture defined by written language and printed materials to a linked, clustered hypertexted society. The change from print to hypertext has implications not only for our thinking, but our organisation of knowledge and the way we relate to it and its authors. This has implication for hierarchy, power, control, cultural- guidelines (constraints).
Who creates the web of the Net?
The Internet is powered by the ability of our minds to relate, to organise, categorise, cluster and reference. That means we not only create the content but decide who would contribute and in which order to the emergence of the context. Deciding on order of contribution is another way of allocating roles.
How are roles affecting the creation of social structures?
Adopting Radcliffe-Brown’s(1965/1952) and Nadel’s (1957) notion of
structure as being comprised of positions relative to one another, and Bourdieu ‘s notion of ‘field’ as consisting of a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forums of power(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), indicates a ‘relational ‘ perception of social structures, and the conceptualisation of structures as networks of social relations among objective positions, rather than relations among individuals(Allan, 2005).
Allan, M. (2005). Conceptualising Social Space in Cyberspace: A Study of the Interactions in Online Discussion Forums. Unpublished PhD (embargoed), University of Canterbury, Christchurch.
