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Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the communicative ecology in inner-city apartment buildings
Abstract
Certain patterns of interaction between people point to networks as an adequate conceptual model to characterize some aspects of social relationships mediated or facilitated by information and communication technology. Wellman proposes a shift from groups to networks and describes the ambivalent nature inherent in an egocentric yet still well-connected portfolio of sociability with the term ‘networked individualism’. In this paper, qualitative data from an action research study of social networks of residents in three inner-city apartment buildings in Australia are used to provide empirical grounding for the theoretical concept of networked individualism. However, this model focuses on network interaction rather than collective interaction. The authors propose ‘communicative ecology’ as a concept which integrates the three dimensions of ‘online and offline’, ‘global and local’ as well as ‘collective and networked’. They present their research on three layers of interpretation (technical, social and discursive) to deliver a rich description of the communicative ecology they found, that is, the way residents negotiate membership, trust, privacy, reciprocity, permeability and social roles in person-to-person mediated and direct relationships. They find that residents seamlessly traverse between online and offline communication; local communication and interaction maintains a more prominent position than global or geographically dispersed communication; and residents follow a dual approach which allows them to switch between collective and networked interaction depending on purpose and context.
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Details
- Available online: 16 Oct 2007
Author affiliations
- a Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, QLD 4059
Author biographies
Marcus Foth is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. Marcus's research interest is at the intersection of people, place and technology. He is pioneering new development approaches towards interactive social networking systems informed by community, social and urban studies and employing human-centred and participatory design methods. His doctoral thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildingsdelivered advanced understandings in new media interaction design, sociology, urban studies and community informatics. Marcus is leading the technical refinement of network action research and its appropriation to the context of social networks in urban neighbourhoods. He helps to build bridges between new media and new urbanism theories and promotes cross-disciplinary relationships and exchange. Marcus is also a sessional tutor and lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty, and web designer and information architect of several commercial and community web projects. More information can be found at http://www.vrolik.de.
Greg Hearn,PhD, is Professor of Media and Communication and the Director of the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Brunel University, UK, and Cornell University, New York, and has been involved in high-level consultancy and applied research with organizations such as the Broadband Services Expert Group, British Airways, Brisbane Airport and many Australian government agencies, focusing on adaptation to new media technologies. Greg has also been chief investigator of several national competitive research grants and author or co-author of many publications including the recent book: Rooney, D., Hearn G. & Ninan A. (eds) (2005) The Knowledge Economy Handbook, Edward Elgar, London.
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