Out of the Limelight: Discredited Communities and Informal Communication on the Internet |
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| Authors: | Chandra Mukerji Bart Simon |
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| Institution: | Is professor of communication, sociology, and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her 1989 book, A Fragile Power: Science and the State;(Princeton), won the Robert K. Merton Award. Her latest book is Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, in press). She has written numerous articles on art, science, engineering, and popular culture, many of which explore the usefulness of material culture analyses for understanding cultural change. She is also interested in the use of microsociological theory for explaining political processes that shape patterns of social order and change usually addressed with macrostructural analyses. Is a lecturer in sociology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He is completing his dissertation on the afterlife of the cold fusion controversy in the science studies program at the University of California, San Diego. |
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| Abstract: | In this article we will suggest that print and related traditional media have been used more successfully in constituting a public sphere than in supporting more private and localized forms of community building (Habermas 1989; Stone 1991). The costs and control of print media, in addition to the stability of the content, have reduced the applicability of these media to the improvisatory and quotidian social processes that groups use to help keep themselves cohesive. In contrast, computer-based interactions have been and are being used extensively to support many of the informal interactions and related activities necessary to communities, giving members new tools for negotiating and rehearsing public forms of group life (Jones 1995). We hope to show how the public aspirations and problems of social groups shape their encounters with computers and encourage them to use computer interaction to manage their public representations. |
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