Week 2: Delineating community in binary terms

This morning's lecture discussion centered upon the concept of binary thinking - a method widely employed among communications discourse - and how different theorists have applied this paradigm to their analyses of 'community'.

The first, 'Community v Society', is easily demonstrated by the events of the Victorian Bushfires - whereby authorities initially denied members of the affected communities access to their main road, while a special media convoy had been given permission to enter. In this case, while the individual members of Kinglake and the surrounding towns were at odds with the television news & current affairs' networks, whose desire to 'be the first' to report on location actually superceded their regard for the locals who had suffered most dramatically.

Fortunately, the plans for the convoy's priority entry were foiled, but the relationship between community and broader society had been clearly demarcated - quite ostensibly at the expense of the former. However, the residents' ability to stand united under even the most devastating of circumstances, demonstrates the underlying ethos of strength and unity that pervades classical expressions of a tightly-knit community.

Similarly, the second binary, Country v city, establishes a conceptual polarity between those living within rural and urban spaces. This notion is most famously explored in the work of Tonnies, whose essay on 'Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft' essentially treats the two geographic local as individual kinds of societies, whose mentality and values are more or less diametrically opposed. His extreme views serve to romanticise the authentic, ageless ideal of communal interaction that is not corrupted by the superficial modus operandi that takes places within cities (which appear to be more concerned with the proliferation of the self). The contrast between the two is made distinct by the attitudes towards space: that is, sharing the space with others in a meaningful way, as opposed to merely co-habiting it alongside a myriad of strangers - which creates tension.

The third, lastly, which I began to discuss in one of my ealier posts - is the binary between face-to-face and virtual communities. Though this is a much more recent phenomenon, it argues that the absence of chance or haphazard encounters (when one is continually communicating with those already in their social sphere) results in a sense of loss in terms of communal development. Rather than treating technology such as mobile telephony and the internet as being complimentary to already meaningful social relations, the theory argues that such modes of communication are devoid of the emotional and physical gestures that are essential to maintaining positive community ties.

The reading by Harris elaborates on these absences in far more detail, something which I will come back to in one of my next entries (it is lengthy enough to warrant a separate reflection!).

Ideology: restrictive or expansive?

Some of the questions raised in reference to the Week 1 reading, included:

1. Can you have community in the city?

2. How vulnerable is it?

3. Is it 'organic' & anti-structure?

4. Can it be thought of as a safe-haven where individuals are nutured, or an ideal wherein individualism is diminished?

5. Does it subsume the individual? (i.e. in saying "united we stand")


Delanty notes that many of the popular theoretical frameworks surrounding community recognise that it can be defined as a term that sets and identifies clear boundaries between its members and other groups within society. While the late 19th century saw the term being defined as a cultural product rather than a political ideal, the twentieth century focused upon a more moral, rigid, traditional understanding of community, being at odds with the rogue-like influences of technology (and what we have come to understand as user-generated content).

[note: I have the rest of this & other posts saved to my work computer - to be retrieved and updated 20/3/2010]