Up from Facebook: #Occupy—(Re)Building and Empowering Communities. by Michael Gurstein
#OWS (occupy Wall Street and the “Occupy” movement) have been widely discussed but not as yet in the context of a broader understanding of an evolving Digital/Information Society. Castells and Wellman and his colleagues have argued that the Digital or Information Society (or in their term the “networked society”) results in social relationships characterized by what they call “networked individualism” …It is the move from densely-knit and tightly-bounded groups to sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks. Each person is a switchboard, between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals, rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Each person operates a separate personal community network, and switches rapidly among multiple sub-networks. For them, the organic and multi-dimensional relationships of communities are being transformed into narrow digitally-enabled, highly individualized, networked relationships; perhaps most widely recognizable as Facebook “friend”-ings accompanied by Facebook “like”-ings as a possible substitute for shared community values and norms. Regrettably their analysis nowhere points out how these changes reduce the capacity for individuals to protect themselves from the on-going encroachments of an impersonal neo-liberal marketplace and particularly how it undermines the possibility of solidarity which in the past has proven to be the most effective basis for effective resistance. Certainly politics in the Information Society seems to have taken the shape prescribed for it by the marketplace—fragmented, concerned with short-term individualized interest maximization, personality-obsessed media saturation and so on. These changes in turn have been propelled by the forces of technology and the breakdown of established employment structures, education patterns, industry-based physical communities, even family and friendship ties under the avalanche of neo-liberal induced corporate and governmental restructuring, outsourcing, downsizing and so on. more... http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/up-from-facebook-occupy%e2%80%94rebuilding-and-empowering-communities/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
