Collective Action, Not Community
Marc Smith (Microsoft Research) on the word community, during the opening key-note at 2nd International Symposium in Media Informatics:
... let's shelve the word 'community' and use and study the term collective action instead.
There are over 150 definitions of community by social scientists. If we (the social scientists) are not able to decide what it is, maybe everybody else should not be using the word either...
I like the focus on collective action. It echos the gist of my working definition of knowledge: the ability to act.
I like the subtitle of this conference: Cowpaths, agency in social software. Cowpaths has the right ring for me, it connects to my notion of how social software helps you create and follow traces that coalesce into patterns to help you navigate the information abundance we find ourselves in in this digital age.
[UPDATE] Interestingly enough Marc's group is called the Microsoft ResearchCommunity Technology Group as Sebastian Fiedler just pointed out to me :)
PermalinkTon, I'd be happy to retire the word "informatics" too - don't know what kinds of connotations it has for you, but to my ear here it has the ring of someone working hard to intellectualize things perhaps beyond what they need to be.
I'll stand up for community, though. You don't always need to have a unified sense of collective action to make a group worthwhile - some communities are there for fellowship and shared human interest without the imperative for explicit goal-directed seeking.
Posted by: Edward Vielmetti at November 21, 2006 1:34 PMLots of people want to dump the word "community" because it has been overused. Fair enough. But the trouble is that you cannot really build trusted relations with people in totally open spaces. As soon as you want to go below the surface of things, you have to draw the line between those who are in and those who are out of the group. That's precisely what a community is, i.e. a cornerstone of human societies and a foundation of civilization itself.
Posted by: Martin Dugage at November 26, 2006 4:00 PM
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