The Community Questions
1) Wellmann
Wellmann refutes the claim that community groups are disappearing with the advent of “industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, capitalism, socialism and technological change,” leaving behind individuals who feel isolated and alienated. Instead, he argues that community groups are not dissolving but merely changing from fairly small, local, and highly connected groups into larger, global, “sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded” social networks.
Although his argument does make sense, it is unfortunate that he doesn’t provide more evidence as to why people’s perception of the past includes so many fallacies or more specifically, why people are wrong in thinking that “preindustrial communities may never have been as locally bounded as tradition has maintained.”
Moreover, it also seems like Wellmann does not provide adequate support as to why people are not satisfied with the current state of communities and why they are feeling nostalgic. Are we really so ignorant about the past that we don’t recognize the problems with older types of communities or is it the case that the new communities that have replaced the old ones do not function in the same way at all, causing people to question the nature and purpose of these new types of communities? And considering all this, would it be fair to compare communities of the past with the communities of today? Modern communities are so much more complex and function on so many different levels when compared to older communities that it might not even be fair to place them under the same umbrella.
2) Freeman
It was interesting to see issues of social networks discussed in cartoons as it reminded me how deeply these issues are integrated into our everyday lives. However, it also made me realize that although we come across these sorts of situations very often we are not consciously aware of the inner workings of such interactions at all. This could be the reason of our efforts to name and classify these phenomena through cartoons.
On a different note, Figure 3 of the cartoons also made me think about the nature of new communities that Wellmann talks about, especially Internet communities. Since such communities are interest-based, they are not stable and the ties might change over time as demonstrated by the cartoon. It would be interesting to look at the problems caused by such instabilities of new communities.
3) Monge & Contractor
Although it was a pretty straightforward article the examples provided were not too insightful. I also have to admit that the part about “Structural Holes” was not very clear. However, the terms outlined in this chapter still clarified a lot of issues discussed in the Wellmann article and/or mentioned in the cartoons. For instance, the notion of a web of social relations mentioned in Figure 1 of the cartoons and explained by Wellmann as a network of nodes and ties became a clearer concept with the proper definitions. It’s just mind-boggling to think about such a web for one’s entire relations and to realize that we all function within such a web without the need to visualize its various elements. So how consciously do we utilize these concepts in our daily lives?