Bell, COMMUNITY AND CYBERCULTURE

Bell’s discusion around community and cyberculture seems to me to be completely benign, reflecting some aspects of RL communities and online communities. What interests me is not pure online communities, but what Bell describes as the potential of subculture to evolve. I’ve tried to place Bell in context with my own online activity. I would say I’m a member of two online communities, one of which is an RL community (this is defined outside of my general everyday life activity, talking to next door neighbours etc).

Firstly #MSCEL, and secondly I belong to the Fellrunning community. I would say #MSCEL is fully in the digital domain, but my Fellrunning community is very much a RL community that is increasingly supported online. Within the fellrunning community we have growth of subcultures or maybe factions of the parent community. Part of Bell’s discussion deals with the online as threat to RL communities, I would like to disagree, and say that online communities support and grow communities. If I take my fellrunning community, that community is active in Twitter (#fellrunning), each running club has a website, and a lot have active forums. I run my clubs website kendalac.co.uk, but I feel very much connected to a broader fellrunning community. Asking the question, without the digital domain would I feel as connected to the braider fellrunning community? I doubt it.. Has this some association with transliteracy?

I’m working on project at UoC, development of institutional academic networks (inc data capture, visualisation). This includes the use of shared learning artifacts as nodes to facilitate discusion and the spread of good practice. We did try facebook type networks ‘Yammer’ – this didn’t really work, there appeared to be little focus for a broad institutional discusion. The concept of transliteracy appears to be working to better extent, creation of artifacts to give foucs… Hmmm… coming back to artifacts?!*** Isn’t this always case, even in some pure RL communities?