The Communication Review

Special issue on Networks, Communities, and the Public Sphere


 After thirty years of slow propagation from military research centers in the United States, computer networking has become a broad-based social movement. This movement is best known through the popular discourse of "network communities" on the Internet and other global network services. But it also includes significant efforts to develop "community networks" to facilitate community organizing, local business alliances, and access to government information. The dualism of these two phrases -- network communities and community networks -- is one indication of the complex interweaving between the social dynamics and the technical structures of computer networking. The new technologies provide an infrastructure for a wide variety of organizing activities, and they are widely held to portend substantial changes in the character of democracy. Differential access to networking technology, moreover, has been widely predicted to hold serious consequences for both economic and political equality in an emerging information society.

Interdisciplinary research on networks and communities can contribute to an evaluation of these claims. How do network communities operate in practice? What social processes condition an individual or group's ability to benefit from computer networks? How are the social movements around computer networking organized? How do the dynamics of community life influence the shape of networking movements, and how do the emerging networks interact with the communities around them? How are emerging media changing the classical issues of political participation such as freedom of speech and the press, political knowledge, and the emerging media changing the classical issues of political participation such as freedom of speech and the press, political knowledge, and the nature of social movements? How are law and policy responding to these changes? And what challenges, if any, do these new developments pose to the very concepts of community and politics?

This special issue of The Communication Review will examine these questions. Articles are welcome from all disciplines relating to human communication research, including anthropology, law, political science, rhetoric, and sociology. These articles should be around 10,000 words in length and should bring a developed theoretical discussion to bear on particularly empirical materials. The deadline for submission of manuscripts is March 1, 1996 but potential contributors are encouraged to correspond with the special issue editor, Phil Agre, well before that date.

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KAIROS

Kairos 1.1 (Spring 1996): News