SOCIALIZING THE NETWORKED INDIVIDUAL

This panel adds the question of emerging and changing socialities to the broader nexus of mobilities and mobile communication studies, using the emerging concept of "mobilie socialities." "Mobile socialities" demarcates a new constellation of media scholarship that seeks to encapsulate human subjectivities of media as they are embedded in human processes, structures and experiences of mobility and sociality. The concept speaks to and critically builds upon notions of ‘networked individualism’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012), ‘network sociality’ (Wittel 2001) and ‘mediated mobilism’ (Hartmann 2013) to conceptualize productive ways of studying the social lives inherent in digitally mediated structures, subjectivities and practices of mobility. The four ethnographic papers on this panel develop this emerging concept through important topics including migration, experience, temporality, and precarity. In addressing the phenomena of people on the move and the role (or not) of mobile media in everyday instances of mobility and sociality, this panel contributes to a broader understanding of differing types of ‘mobile figures’ in networked times.

Book Review: Technically Together: Reconstructing Community in a Networked World

Social scientists know that technologies, new or old, do not inherently constitute community. A town hall is, after all, just a building; its walls take on meaning when people breathe social life through its doors, establish a shared purpose, and form relationships with one another. But so far scholars have not well evaluated existing theories of how digital technologies do, or do not, aid in the development of community. What’s missing is a reconciliation of contemporary manifestations of social interaction with classic sociological theories of community. Taylor Dotson tackles this challenge head-on, bolstered by a staunch critique of Barry Wellman’s theory of networked individualism, or the idea that digital technologies have transformed community life to sets of relationships are less local, more global, and centered on interests rather than local necessity. “Try getting a Facebook status update to help move a couch or stay for dinner,” Dotson huffs, in an early hook. Technically Together assembles a wealth of “technology” cases – not just digital devices or internet environs, but woodstoves, bars, cooperative business, and zoning structures – and applies a framework for evaluating whether each abets, or depresses, core tenets of community. Dotson denaturalizes assumptions of not only what counts as technologies (any structure, really) but also injects a perspective as to which are technologies of community.

A Quest for Communitas

Despite the fragmentation of audience behaviour and the pluralization of platforms within the media cultures of the digital age, cultural memory practices retain an important feature: They echo a basic existential quest for communitas. The present article compares two seemingly incomparable regimes of memory of our time: the anniversaries of 9.11 on Swedish television and web communities of commemoration of lost loved ones. It suggests through these contrasting examples that existential themes are pursued in the face of three challenges: the temporality of instantaneity, the all-pervasive networked individualism that makes memory into a matter of elective affinities, and the technological capacities that subject memory to endless revision. The article explores the existential dimension of these memory practices in line with research within the culturalist emphasis on the study of media and religion. This debate recognizes the need for a broader understanding of the mediated qualities of religion and the religious qualities of the media. The article argues that both televisual anniversaries of trauma that invite audiences to an annual return, and our new multiple and fragmented media memories compel us to conceive of our hyper-contingent, late-modern digital age as a quest for meaning, transcendence and cohesion – for what Victor Turner (1969) called existential communitas.

Self, community and language in the network society

The article argues that the electronically mediated communication contributes to the construction of new, mediated forms of communities the functions of which to foster communities of interest, information spread, and equality of status all work to enhance social capital, despite their lack of direct physical orientation. The mediated, networked individuals treat these mediated communities as real. Therefore the appearance of these new forms of communities leads to the new conceptualization of the relation between self and community. The essence of community can be regarded as a kind of networked individualism in which the networked individuals can chose their own communities, rather than are fitted into them with others involuntarily. Thus the new, mediated form of community implies an individual-center existence and weaker social ties. The new technologies foster communication links outside the individuals’ immediate social surrounds. The aim of this article is to show that the medium of the mediatization and new conceptualization of community is a specific, pictorial language of electronically mediated communication.

The networked question in the digital era: How do networked, bounded, and limited individuals connect at different stages in the life course?

We used in-depth interviews with 101 participants in the East York section of Toronto, Canada to understand how digital media affects social connectivity in general—and networked individualism in particular—for people at different stages of the life course. Although people of all ages intertwined their use of digital media with their face-to-face interactions, younger adults used more types of digital media and have more diversified personal networks. People in different age-groups conserved media, tending to stick with the digital media they learned to use in earlier life stages. Approximately one-third of the participants were Networked Individuals: In each age-group, they were the most actively using digital media to maintain ties and to develop new ones. Another one-third were Socially Bounded, who often actively used digital media but kept their connectivity within a smaller set of social groups. The remaining one-third, who were Socially Limited, were the least likely to use digital media. Younger adults were the most likely to be Networked Individuals, leading us to wonder if the percentage of the population who are Bounded or Limited will decline over time.

The Internet in Daily Life

No other information and communication technology in history has spread at the pace of the Internet. Data from the Pew Research Center and NetLab, focused on the North America, shows how the spread of digital technology has reshaped the flow of daily life, vastly expanded the personal and information boundaries of users, and transformed the way people take care of their health, learn new things, and act as citizens. While change continues, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman discern general social trends, including a large shift from small, tight-knit, locally rooted social groups to larger, more loosely knit, and geographically expanded personal networks, which they call “networked individualism.” This chapter provides an introduction into how digital innovations over the past generation have been adopted by users and how the utility of these tools is reshaping the ways people spend their time, enlighten themselves, and carry on in their daily lives.