CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Communication & Community: Definitions

Organiser: Susanna Paasonen

Paasonen, Susanna (University of Turku, Finland) CONSUMING COMMUNITIES
Since the mid 1990s, the term "community" has become widely employed in commercialising the Internet and used in portals, e-commerce sites and women's web sites alike. In this presentation, I look at the uses of "community" in mainstream women's web sites, focusing on the simultaneous address of women as Internet users and consumers. In this context, community refers less to communication between different community members than it does to returning users, conditions of usage and strategies of framing sites from portals to zines and search services as something "for us women." I am especially interested in the kinds of semantic shifts that occur with the term community, and how women, as category, become defined.

Sundén, Jenny (Linkoping University, Sweden) THE LIFE AND LOVES OF A SHE-CYBORG: FEMINIST REFLECTIONS FROM A PLACE CALLED WATERMOO
This paper sets out to formulate a theoretical framework for studies of online communities by investigating the interlinkage of text and matter in text-based virtual worlds (so called MUDs). Letting a two-year online-ethnographic study serve as a backdrop, the discussion will focus on the 'doubleness' of cyber-subjectivity. Typists and their online characters are never one and the same, but they are definitely not separate either. Perhaps one could say that they overlap. Central to this discussion is a re-reading of the 'death of the Author' story in an effort to move this poststructuralist line of thought away from its engagement with textual 'surfaces' toward a theory of texts as always materially and sexually engraved. An important figuration in this reformulation is an upgraded, high-tech version Fay Weldon's she-devil in terms of a she-cyborg…

Chin, Bertha (Goldsmiths College, United Kingdom) HIERARCHY IN VIRTUAL FAN COMMUNITIES
The formation of communities remains an important part of fan practices, and the emergence of the Internet has overhaul the way fandom has been conducted, enabling fans to participate effortlessly in their community life virtually. The notion of a hierarchical structure, as well as negotiations of power within fandom has largely been overlooked by academics, much less within a relatively 'new' phenomenon such as virtual fan communities. A hierarchical structure, along with some form of power 'negotiation' exists to enable fans to perform their 'fannish' rituals online, as well as functioning to maintain some form of 'law' and order within virtual fan communities. This paper will be an attempt to examine the impact of a hierarchical structure on virtual fan communities, specifically that of the hit television series, The X-Files, whereby I will be approaching the notion of hierarchy from two angles, that of fandom and cyberspace studies.

Hessel Silveira, Rosa Maria and Maria Garbin, Elisabete (Luterana University of Brazil and Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil) CHAT ROOMS ABOUT MUSIC ON THE INTERNET: A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY?
The main objective of this paper is to outline aspects of the constitution of juvenile identities through the analysis of chat rooms about music, in order to discuss if we can understand them as virtual communities. Therefore, it was studied how teenagers - chosen arbitrarily from chat rooms about music - show, understand and invest in different kinds of music, how they search for imitation of their stars, how they stand as producers of their own music, how they are geographically located so far and at the same time so near on the net and how some identities traits of gender, ethnicity emerge, trying to understand how the music they listen to and musical dispositions contribute to the processes of building their identities and what they are. The coincidences and the differences chosen allow us to consider these chat rooms as "micro" communities, similar to others "real" communities.

Hård af Segerstad, Ylva (Göteborg University, Sweden) LINGUISTIC CONVNETIONS IN SMS - COMMUNITY OR MEDIUM SPECIFIC?
This study analyzes language use in a number of Swedish informants' SMS messages (text messaging via mobile phones). Both medium and situational variables influence how messages are formulated and what is communicated. Constraining factors are the text-based mode, production and consumption conditions, max 160 characters/message. SMS affords other communication settings than spoken interaction: it does not need to be synchronous. Such factors invite users to employ creative ways of adapting and using language to suit the constraints and affordances of the mode. Words that can be presupposed are frequently left out, emoticons are used to convey tone. Innovative abbreviations seem to be conventionalized. The auto text input mode might be speeding the tendency to write Swedish compound words as two words. These conventions seem to be due to both the mode of communication and to a community of users: specific conventions act as in-group and activity markers.

Communication and Community: Locations

Kotamraju, Nalini P. (University of California at Berkeley, USA) PUSHERS, PLUMBERS, AND PEDIATRICIANS: THE SYMBOLISM OF THE PAGER IN THE UNITED STATES - 1975 TO 1995 The sociology of culture field often discusses the capacity of capitalist institutions to control and to co-opt the symbolic meaning of material objects, including the association between goods and particular communities. In this paper, I analyse the symbolic meaning of the pocket pager, as represented by U.S. newspapers from 1975 to 1995. While the pager traditionally has been associated with "respectable" people such as emergency professionals, I show that for a brief period in U.S. history ­- coinciding with the U.S. "war against drugs" -­ the pager evoked a more "disreputable" group of people: drug dealers, gang members, and non-white people. I document the ways that various institutions ­- pager manufacturers and service providers, public school boards, and city councils -­ reacted to the pager and, of course, to the communities it symbolized.

Bassett, Elizabeth H. (University of Brighton, United Kingdom) LGBT BRIGHTON ONLINE AND OFF: THE INTERNET IN LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITIES IN BRIGHTON, UK
The Internet has been heralded as a catalyst and means for transformation of communication patterns and community belonging. This paper focuses on a demographic group that has seen a disproportionately high growth in Internet use, presenting findings from studies of Internet use by members of LGBT communities in Brighton, UK. Ethnographic research techniques were used, and analysis centred on definitions and meanings of Community, Sexuality, and the Internet deployed by members of these communities. The paper asks how online activity might be investigated within the context of users' offline activity. A cross-disciplinary approach is taken, drawing on theoretical concerns from media and cultural studies, sociology and Internet studies. This paper is offered as a contribution to an ongoing debate as to the role of the Internet in communities and everyday lives.

Sveningsson, Malin (Viktoria Institute, Sweden) CITIES, SETTLEMENTS AND SMALL TOWNS: THE DYNAMICS OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES
Among other things, the Internet provides us with new environments to meet and interact with other individuals, and in the past few years, the numerous fora for social interaction on the Internet have led to discussions and research on what is commonly referred to as virtual communities. There has been wide disagreements of how these communities should be seen, and whether they should be called communities at all. One of the recurring subjects in discussions on online communities is whether online environments can be seen as places or not. Whatever the answer to that question may be, it seems like characteristics of offline communities, such as cities, small towns and villages, may still some times apply to online communities, and that online communities to a large extent is governed by the same dynamics as offline communities.

Bromseth, Janne C.H. (NTNU, Norway) COMMUNITIES OF WHAT? ASPECTS OF CULTURAL SITUATEDNESS IN TWO FEMALE PREDOMINATED ONE-NATIONAL ELECTRONIC DISCUSSION GROUPS
The term of online communities is often used to characterize net-mediated group communication with a certain stability of participating members. But what is the cultural situatedness of an "online" group other than being net-mediated? I will show how groups within different Scandinavian local cultural contexts create and negotiate meaning, not only as members of a net-situated group, but also from social positions as Scandinavian doctors, radicals, lesbians and mothers-to-be, focussing in particular focus on how discourses of gender and sexuality are created on two women-predominated lists. Further; how does group members' social relations outside of the net-based community seem to effect the interaction in the online group context?