Week Review 5
Communities are very real and natural. Humans create communities, because this is how we live and survive. Our look at communities does however differ greatly depending on our profession. Are we a politician, a sociologist, a manufacturer of consumer goods?
Educators hope that understanding a community might tell us something about the individual in the particular community. The difficulty is, however, that every single one of us is part of a number of communities.
I am a fan of SC Freiburg. The club and its fans have a very clear image. But I am also a musician, a father, a partner to my girlfriend, a German citizen, a student. I am part of many communities.
Looking at me as a football fan, we might make assumptions which are possibly wrong as soon as I leave the football stadium, because other communities will tell you different, sometimes opposing things about me.
In a classroom full of pupils, every single one of them is member of a variety of communities, too. Can we make assumptions about the individuals in a classroom, simply because they share the same room at the same time?
Yes we should be looking at communities, but with caution. Whenever we are putting community first, we are putting the individual second. But as educators, we should always put the individual first. We should examine the individuals and then see, what they have in common, not the other way around. We are here to help the individual. And we must not forget that looking at communities may very well blur our judgements.
2 thoughts on “Week Review 5”
Hello Dirk, thanks for this weekly summary.
Out of interest, how has the character of your lifestream been affected by involvement in the micro ethnography exercise over the last week?
‘I am a fan of SC Freiburg. The club and its fans have a very clear image. But I am also a musician, a father, a partner to my girlfriend, a German citizen, a student. I am part of many communities.’
This is something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been reading the blog lifestreams. I wonder whether, in an effort to make sense of the nature of interaction that takes place within emerging digital spaces, there can sometimes be a tendency to make generalisations about community that are overly simplistic? I wonder what is lost, for instance, when we designate an individual as a ‘newbie’, not only for the individual but also the community of which he or she is part?
By coincidence I’ve recently been reading ‘Soccer Tribes’ by Desmond Morris, an ethnography of football culture. Although it is based around research in the early 1980s, I think some of the negative representations of football supporters persist to this day, even if they are often quite tired (or certainly less to the fore than they once were). To apply this the digital setting – and to pick up on a point you have made earlier in your lifestream blog – I wonder whether in digital settings there is a particular tendency (or an expectation?) to keep our involvement in different communities distinct? As you say ‘every single one of us is part of a number of communities’ however I wonder when in educational settings like EDC and the MOOC field site, we try to play this down. Why is it for instance that I thought twice about referring to an ethnography of football culture within this post for fear that it might not sit comfortably alongside the serious scholarly business of the day?
“…how has the character of your lifestream been affected by involvement in the micro ethnography exercise over the last week?”
I chatted about MOOC and ethnography on Twitter, which is reflected on the lifestream. I would however say that the affect is rather limited.
“I wonder whether, in an effort to make sense of the nature of interaction that takes place within emerging digital spaces, there can sometimes be a tendency to make generalisations about community that are overly simplistic?”
Afaik this happens everwhere all the time. Our brains are built this way, so we simplyfy an increasingly complex world, mostly unconsciously. I believe there are only two things we can do about this, as our brains are the way they are and have been for 70,000 or 2000,000 years, depending on where we draw the evolutionary line: We should be aware about the processes inside our nodies. And we should try to make it as easy as possible for us and everyone else to be understood. For example by actively refusing to play different roles in different social contexts. The less others must interpret about us, the less mistakes they make. So you are a football fan? Be one, no matter the context. We can not keep playing roles or at least presenting sifferent shades of ourselves on different occasions and then be surprised, why noone in the world seems to understand oneanother. But yrs, it takes courage – or foolishness, to stop playing games our societies have so creatively designed.