mtl3p

this has been rattling around in my head and I don’t know if i’m going to find the time to write the version I want to of it - so I thought I would jot down some stuff now.

So I’ve always liked the idea of the audience of my blog being an imagined audience. As well as the idea that you are some kind of community just because you stop by hear semi-regularly. Recently (maybe since london or a bit before) I got the feeling like this audience had grown. There’s no real reason for that except for a few indications here and there (re-postings and new commenters) and I’m extrapolating from that (side note - I have specifically asked boris to Not install a stats package for this blog - so I really have no way of telling).

This (sense of a) larger audience has been making me very uneasy.

(I’m using the extended entry because I want people to read the earlier post)

Not only because I think that there are more of you, but also because I wonder about your motives for coming here. I’ve been thinking that you’re coming here for the tech stuff and that, in fact, you don’t care about me at all ;-) No, really - I’ve felt a kind of pressure to blog more about topics (like open movement, tech prognostications, or the like) and to reduce the amount of more personal stuff or stuff that is only relevant to people that know me or live in Montreal.

That makes sense, right?

But then I realized that there has been *absolutely*no* indication that any of the people that have come by here are of that opinion. I am completely fabricating that idea and indeed, the exact opposite might be true - that people come here *in spite* of the long-winded, poorly researched “hacking the city” posts and MMORPG chicken-little routine that I’ve been doing.

Hmm. . .

So that made me think more about how I was imagining you all - and how I was 1) grouping (well, really “coralling” is a better word) you all into a community, and then 2) according some kind of opinion to that community. All because I am still struggling with the idea of sharing my stories and feeling in this space/way. So I was uncomfortable with the idea that sharing myself could be compelling - but instead of recognizing that I projected that lack of interest unto you - some imagined community.

I thought that was kinda interesting.

And then that made me start thinking about the second mission of ISF - loosely “to use our networks/hotspots to support community at our hotspots”. We try to stay away from the word “create” because it seems arrogant (and just plain stupid) to say that we’re trying to “create community”. But then I realized that there *isn’t* community at some of our hotspots. Some of them are just waystations to get coffee and there is no sense of participation or of valued interaction between the people/clients. So ISF is in some way “imagining” a community at that venue or (or parc, or library), assuming that they have some desire to become “more” of a community, and then were giving_them / forcing_upon_them the tools to do that.

So in some ways it might be more appropriate to use the world “create” when we’re talking about community. Because these networks weren’t created by people from these cafes or parcs and those venues that did contact us never requested that they do more than simply serve free internet access. So “creating” might be better - because it foists the responsablity (good or bad) for this stuff squarely on our shoulders - which is maybe where it should be.

This whole idea of media allowing for (and encouraging) the creation of imagined communities comes from this one book that I read by Benedict Anderson.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Definition of Imagined Community (p.5-7):
It is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
1) It is imagined because the members never know their fellow-members. Nationalism invents nation.
2) It is imagined as limited bcause it has finit boundaries.
3) It is imagined as sovereign because this is an age of post-Enlightenment and Revoltion, i.e., an age of freedom of individuals
4) It is imagined as a community because the nation is conceived as deep, horizontal comradeship.
link

I wrote more about the idea of imagined communities and blogging here.

The real brain-twister that I like about this is that even if you guys *are* a community - that doesn’t take away from you being an imagined community of mine. Similarly - with the hotspots - there might be real communities out there - but how much they resemble our (ISF’s) imaginings of them is anybody’s guess.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.