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SIX

TELECOMMUNITY

Rethinking community

For a term that is so over-used in media publics, it is remarkable how
under-theorized ‘community’ is today. Since the nineteenth century, when
Ferdinand Tönnies formulated what has become the most widely refer-
enced understanding of community, in his Community and Association
(1995), little formal analysis of community has been undertaken. And yet
a certain regard for community has constantly endured throughout the
discourses of modernity as a key term of reference and as a legitimating
narrative for the human sciences and civic discourse.
For example, in the documentation of modern field research, ‘com-
munity’ is a key identifier for research into ‘impact assessment’. The des-
tination of such ‘impacts’, whether they are of electronic media, urban
developments or just about any governmental policy it is possible to
name, is invariably ‘community’. And yet, oddly, few of these documents
feel compelled to define ‘community’ at all. At best, they tend to defer to
‘community’ as a legitimating narrative which is safe to deploy precisely
because of its ambiguity.
In the nineteenth century, the principal theorists of community were
Tönnies and Émile Durkheim. Durkheim’s concept of the conscience col-
lective can be added to Tönnies’ distinction between community and asso-
ciation, as foundational theories which have been little explored in terms
of their relevance today. At the same time, new conceptions of community
have co-emerged in relation to globalization and telecommunication
which either reinforce mythological conceptions of community, by argu-
ing that such a fiction is being ‘lost’, or advance new bases of human asso-
ciation that did not exist previously.
In this chapter, the relevance of the old and the new accounts of
community to studying media and communications will be thoroughly
examined. In particular, we will be looking at whether broadcast and net-
worked mediums of communication can, in themselves, provide contexts
for community as defined by these accounts. The different characteristics
of these types of community will be outlined and their interrelationship
will also be explored. But first, we will examine classical theories of com-
munity as well as some recent claims about the resurgence of community.