L5 Virtual Community

IT in Education: Sociological Perspective: 

IT in Education: Sociological Perspective The Development of IT & Its Social Consequences: The Constitution of Virtual Community and Social Identity Wing-kwong Tsang Ho Tim Bldg. Room 416; Ext. 6922; wktsang@cuhk.edu.hk; www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~wktsang

The Development of IT and Its Impacts on Family: 

The Development of IT and Its Impacts on Family The brief history of the fundamental unit of social integration: Family Family in agrarian society: Family as reproduction unit of society Family as production unit of economy All members held designated role in the production process and were interdependent on each others Family in early industrialized society Structural differentiations between reproduction and production functions of family Man and matured children usually boys worked away from home Man assumed the breadwinning role and woman submitted to the dependent role in the family structure

Impacts on Family: 

Impacts on Family The brief history Family Family in Post-WWII welfare-state Welfare-state intervened into family functions through social policy measures, such as birth-control policy, child labor laws, education policy, housing policy, social welfare policy etc. Family was deprived of most of its functions, i.e. reproductive, productive, and socializing functions, and left with only emotional and spiritual supportive function. Nevertheless, family assume a new function in mass consumption society, i.e. as consumption and even investment unit Woman liberation movement spawned structural changes in the role/power structure of family. Woman would no long assume to dependent or even submissive roles in the patriarchal structure of family

Impacts on Family: 

Impacts on Family The brief history of Family Flexible family and flexible work “The very concept of a job is changing. In the years after World War II, industrial societies constructed the ideal of a full-time, secure job working thirty years for one company with ever-rising real wages. Pay in this job would be high enough that within American family households, only the man had to work. His wife could stay at home, raising the children and managing the household. The ideal of secure work and increasing consumption was matched by government policies that constructed social security (old-age pension, unemployment insurance, and health insurance) largely around the ideal of a men and very little paid work for women is going by the boards, and the new information technology is only one cause of change. The simplest description of the nature of this transformation is increased flexibility.” (Carnoy, 2000, p.64-65)

Impacts on Family: 

Impacts on Family Flexible family and flexible work Flexibility in work implies: Flexible in work schedule as well as work duration Flexible in work locations as well as positions Flexible in work conditions, flexibility has replaced fixed-term contract and long-term commitment between employers and employees “With increased competition in the globalized economy and the rapidly rising capacity to use ‘world time’ to enhance productivity, the very best workers are now those who never sleep, never consume, never have children, and never spend time socializing outside of work.” (Carnoy, 2000, p. 143) )

Impacts on Family: 

Impacts on Family Flexible family and flexible work In knowledge economy and lifelong learning society, family is demanded to assume a new function. It is expect to be the basic unit supporting the everlasting learning projects demand for both working parents and their children Fundamental contradiction in functions of flexible family “What result is a serious social contradiction: the new workplace requires even more investment in knowledge than in the past, and family are crucial to such knowledge formation, especially for children but also for adults. The new workplace, however, contributes to greater instability in the child-centered nuclear family, degrading the very institution crucial to further economic development.” (ibid, p.110)

Impacts on Family: 

Impacts on Family Changes in family structure in flexible economy Less people would enter into marriages. Even if they did, they were much more likely to be divorced than in the 1960s. Marriages were delayed and child rearing were also delayed or even more likely forgone. A smaller percentage of the population lived in a nuclear family household headed by a married couple with children. More percentage of the population lived in nuclear family with no child or even stayed single

The Development of IT and Its Impacts on Community : 

The Development of IT and Its Impacts on Community The advent of the virtual community Transformation of pattern of communication: “Instantaneous social practices are separated from physical contiguity, the traditional face-to-face and time-consuming communications, which are the cornerstone of primary association, have given way to fast, cheap and forgetting communications” (Benedikt, 1995, quoted from Bauman, 1998, p.16).

Impacts on Community : 

Impacts on Community The advent of the virtual community Dissolve of community of yoke: “The so-called 'closely knit communities' of yore were … brought into being and kept alive by the gap between the nearly instantaneous communication inside the small-scale community (the size of which was determined by the innate qualities of 'wetware', and thus confined to the natural limits of human sight, hearing and memorizing capacity) and the enormity of time and expense needed to pass information between locality. On the other hand, the present-day and short life-span of communities appears primarily to be the result of the gap shrinking or altogether disappearing: inner-community communication has no advantage over inter-communal exchange, if both are instantaneous.” (Bauman, 1998, p.5)

Impacts on Community : 

Impacts on Community The advent of the virtual community Cultural-spatial based communities are replaced by virtual community Erosion of spatial based communities scattered around factories and industrial compound in advanced industrial societies as globalized and flexible economy emerged. Class-based and ethnic/religious-based communities also evaporated with the factory-location based communities The emergence of the cyberspace: The space of place and that based on physical contiguity is replace by the space of flow and that based on informational flow. In their replacement advents the virtual community.

Impacts on Community : 

Impacts on Community The advent of the virtual community Howard Rheingold in The virtual community: Homesteading on the electrical frontier (1989) specifies that “Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationship in cyberspace.” (p.3)

Impacts on Community : 

Impacts on Community New notions of community in knowledge society (Carnoy, 2000) In flexible economy “new communities will have to incorporate workers who are more educated, more choice-oriented, more ‘flexible’, more time-conscious, and more eager to influence their environment. The new bond that holds these individuals together in the global information age is the search for knowledge.” (Carnoy, 2000, p. 171)

Impacts on Community : 

Impacts on Community New notions of community in knowledge society (Carnoy, 2000) Accordingly, Martin Carnoy categorizes these knowledge-searching communities into The self-knowledge community: Ethnicity, gender and cultural identity. For examples, black Muslim communities in the US constituted in the 1960s, feminist communities emerged in the 1980s, fundamentalist Muslim in global context since the late 1990s. The knowledge-use community: Professional identification and work networks Informal work-information network Temporary agencies as knowledge-use networks Computer networks as knowledge-use communities

Impacts on Community : 

Impacts on Community New notions of community in knowledge society (Carnoy, 2000) Categorization of knowledge-searching communities The knowledge-production community: Schools as community centers “Knowledge-production centers themselves can be the organizing space for new communities. Individuals and families may no longer be linked socially to a particular neighborhood, but those with children are increasingly linked to child-care centers, preschools, and elementary schools. …Children and parents build friendships and social and civic activities around their children’s care and learning, wherever it takes place. Thus, their community ‘space’ is defined by their children’s day care and schooling rather by where they live.” (Carnoy, 2000, p. 183)

Individualization and Social Identity in Virtual Community : 

Individualization and Social Identity in Virtual Community The conception of Individualization of modern society “‘ Individualization ’ consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a task and changing the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their performance. ….Human beings are no more ‘born into’ their identities. … Needing to become what one is the feature of modern living - and of this living alone. …Modernity replaces the heteronomic determination of social standing with compulsive and obligatory self-determination.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 32)

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity The conception of Individualization of modern society “‘individualization’ means, first, the disembedding and, second, the re-embedding of industrial society ways of life by new ones, in which the individuals must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves. Thus the name ‘individualization’, disembedding and re-embedding …do not occur by chance, nor individually, nor voluntarily, nor through diverse types of historical conditions, but rather all at once and under the general conditions of the welfare in developed industrial labour society, as they have developed since the 1960s in many Western industrial countries.” (Beck, 1994, p.13)

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity The conception of Individualization of modern society Institutionalized ‘beds’ - identity bases - for the re-embedment of modern individuals ‘Beds’ in capital market, e.g. occupations, professions, social-class positions, etc. ‘Beds’ in institution of marriage and family, husband, wife, father, mother, etc. ‘Beds’ in modern political arenas, e.g. citizens, members of new social movements, such as environmentalists, feminist, anti-gloabizationists, etc.

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity Individualization in Information Age “What distinguished the ‘individualization’ of yore from the form it has taken in ‘risk society’ …. No ‘beds’ are furnished for ‘re-embedding’, and such beds as might be postulated and pursued prove fragile and often vanish before the work of ‘re-embedding’ is complete. There are rather ‘musical chairs’ of various size and style as well as of changing numbers and positions, which prompt men and women to be constantly on the move and promise no ‘fulfilment’, no rest and no satisfaction of ‘arriving’, of researching the final destination, where one can disarm, relax and stop worrying.” (Bauman, 2000, p. 33-34)

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity Individualization in Information Age Flexiblization of modern identity National-local identity replaced by global-mobile identity Affect-familial identity replaced by flexible-familial identity Permanent vocationalism and unionism replaced by flexible, self-programmed workers

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity Individualization in Information Age Bauman’s cultural identity of postmodernity The pilgrim as modern self: Pilgrimage of entrepreneurs, tenured workers, citizens, civil soldiers, husband and wife, etc.

Slide22: 

“Living one’s life as pilgrimage is no longer the kind of ethnical wisdom revealed to, or initiated by, the chosen and the righteous. Pilgrimage is what one does of necessity, to avoid being lost in a desert; to invest the walking with a purpose while wandering the with no destination. Being a pilgrim, one can do more than walk - one can walk to. One can look back at the footprints left in the sand and see them as a road. One can reflect on the road past and see it as a progress towards, an advance, a coming closer to, one can make a destination between ‘behind’ and ‘ahead’, and plot the ‘road ahead’ as a succession of footprints yet to pockmark the land without features. Destination, the set purpose of life’s pilgrimage, gives form to the formless, makes a whole out of the fragmentary, lends continuity to the episodic/” (Bauman, 1996, p. 22)

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity Individualization in Information Age Bauman’s cultural identity of postmodernity The pilgrim as modern self: Pilgrimage of entrepreneurs, tenured workers, citizens, civil soldiers, husband and wife, etc. Life strategy of postmodern self: Stroller Vagabond Tourist Player

Slide24: 

Strollers signifies the life strategy and state of mind of strolling in shopping malls, “finding oneself among strangers and being a stranger to them, taking in those strangers as ‘surfaces’. ….Strolling means rehearsing human reality as a series of episodes, that is as events without past and without consequences. It also means rehearsing meeting as mis-meeting, as encounters without impacts. …The stroller had all the pleasures of modern life without torments attached.” (Bauman, 1996, p. 26-27)

Slide25: 

Vagabond represents the life strategy and attitude of wondering aimlessly and without destination. It also signifies life strategy of unwilling to settle down, to be the native and rooted in the soil. It posts the stance of strangers and “being out of place” to every place and everyone.

Slide26: 

Tourist represents another life strategy of movers, who “move on purpose”. The purposes that tourists have in mind are fun, joy, excitement and most of all careless. “One may say that what tourist buys, what he pays for, what he demands to be delivered … is precisely the right not to be bothered, freedom from any but aesthetic spacing.” (Bauman, 1996, p. 31)

Slide27: 

“The player’s world is the world of risks, of intuition, of precaution-taking. Time in the world-as-play divides into a succession of games.” (p. 31) In other words, player’s world is made up of fragments and episodes of calculated risk. Yet more importantly, player must “make sure that no game leaves lasting consequences, the player must remember (and so must his/her partners and adversaries), that ‘this is but a game’. …The game allows no room for pity, compassion, commiseration or cooperation.” (p.32)

Individualization and Social Identity: 

Individualization and Social Identity The rise of networked individualism and cyber-balkanization “Networked individualism is a social pattern, not a collection of isolated individuals. Rather, individuals build their networks, on-line and off-line, on the basis of their interests, values, affinities, and projects.” (Castells, 2001, p. 131)

The Development of IT & Its Social Consequences:The Constitution of Virtual Community and Social Identity: 

The Development of IT & Its Social Consequences: The Constitution of Virtual Community and Social Identity END