Wellman Article
This post will describe some themes brought up by Barry Wellman, a professor at the University of Toronto, in his essay “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism.” Following posts will examine some issues raised by the article.
Wellman presents three models of social and work community interaction. Little boxes is a model that describes traditional, face-to-face, spatially-dependent modes of communication and interaction. Examples include office meetings, block parties, and neighborhood homeowners’ associations.
Glocalization is what Wellman terms the contemporary hybridization and intersection of spatial and nonspatial networks. Even use of the internet has a spatial component to it, since most people use the internet from a computer they keep at home, school, or the office. When you instant message someone, you can expect them to be at one of these places; even their away message might specify where they are. Wired phones are another example of place-to-place communication.
Networked Individualism is, as Wellman describes it, the resultant and emerging nonspatial extreme. This is true person-to-person contact according to Wellman, which brings up the question of what a person really is. Certainly this kind of ‘person’al interaction is free of many potential biases and distractions, such as appearance, accent, or social standing, that are to some degree peripheral to what a person really feels represents himself. Mobile technology as well as increasing personal travel and mobility is stripping our identities of their roots in places, and emphasizing our identities as we choose to express them through an increasingly widening range of mobile media, though text content is still the predominant way of expressing oneself on the internet.
These three modes of communication are all relevant for the three kinds of online community that I talked about in my last post. Wellman’s are categories of those to whom we network, and the means of communication by which we do it; mine are categories of purposes for which we network, and the motivations and goals thereof.
