Home

In what senses are web communities indeed “communities” by prof. Wouter van Beek

rating_imagerating_imagerating_imagerating_imagerating_image

The most important aspects of communities are living, working, marriage, family. There is no choice, it is for better or worse. There are multistranded relationships, which create a bundle of interdependent relationships. It empirically proved that we are only capable to manage 150 relationships of relevant others. Flexibility and variation is determined by your feet(limited mobility) and there are variations in being equal.The shapes of communities are dependent on their reason of existence. They are like a band and are very stable. They are internally very structured by families, clans, areas and have their own political structure base on age, ex, and experience. Communities changed through the change of their means of existence of energy and production. The so called “web communities ” are pure social networks.Wouter van Beek argues that these “communities” are complementary to existing communities and not an substitute.Participants are only engaged part of their time, there is what he calls a new sodality, geografically speaking there is almost ubiquity , contentwise they are limited,and interaction is seriously reduced, and they only touch one site of the personality.Through the web there are no functional communities. Wouter van Beek spoke at the yearly Vint conference of Sogeti, Leading the big Change. He is antropologist and studies the history and development of communities at the Tilburg University and the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden.


Attachments

RSS feed

1 Comment »

Comment by Michel Bauwens Subscribed to comments via email
2008-07-03 08:35:21

Thanks for that report Albert, I agree, though I would stress the continuity between offline and online. Yes, online communities do not replace family and such, but as we increase the time spent on voluntary value creation, we nevertheless become increasingly dependent on such networks, which become tightly integrated in our daily lives, more so for the coming generations I think. The whole topic of community is covered here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Relational

 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Subscribe to comments via email
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
:brain: :quote: :cash: :cost: :dont: :todo: :imo: :new: !!! :( :)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <img alt="" align="" border="" height="" hspace="" longdesc="" vspace="" src="" width=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> in your comment.