10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17449
application/pdf
2038-3460
17449
2
en
Polina Kolozaridi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Annalisa Pelizza, Communities at a Crossroads: Material Semiotics for Online Sociability in the Fade of Cyberculture, Institute of Networked Cultures, 2018
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
10
Book Reviews
2020-01-30
2023-06-26
2020-01-30
2023-10-09
178-182
TS
Polina Kolozaridi
2019
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17449
178
Higher School of Economics and Club for the Internet and Society Enthusiasts, Moscow
2038-3460
2
en
182
Annalisa Pelizza, Communities at a Crossroads: Material Semiotics for Online Sociability in the Fade of Cyberculture, Institute of Networked Cultures, 2018
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17449/16298
10
178                                                              Tecnoscienza – 10 (2)

References
Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Centemeri, L. (2018) Commons and the new environmentalism of everyday life.
      Alternative value practices and multispecies commoning in the permacul-
      ture movement, in “Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia”, 64 (2), pp. 289-313.
Mollison, B. and Holmgren, D. (1978), Permaculture one: a perennial agricultural
       system for human settlements, Melbourne, Transworld.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2010), Ethical Doings in naturecultures, in “Ethics, Poli-
       cy and Environment. A Journal of Philosophy and Geography”, 13 (2),
       pp. 151-169.
Tsing, A. L. (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of
       life in capitalist ruins, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Yates, L. (2015) Rethinking Prefiguration: Alternatives, Micropolitics and Goals
       in Social Movements, in “Social Movement Studies”, 14 (1), pp. 1-21.



                                       ***
   Annalisa Pelizza
Communities at a Crossroads: Material Semiotics for Online Sociability in
the Fade of Cyberculture, Amsterdam, Institute of Networked Cul-
tures, 2018, pp. 226

Polina Kolozaridi Higher School of Economics and Club for the In-
ternet and Society Enthusiasts, Moscow

    “Digital community” is a tricky term. It is used in such a variety of
contexts, that both words constituting it had almost lost a meaning. Giant
social networking sites like Facebook, influencers with thousands of
followers, small activist groups, neighbors, who have a chat for solving
everyday issues – this is just a small list of those who can name themselves
as participants of an online community. Moreover, not only these groups,
but plenty of scholars follow this definition and write about digital and/or
online communities and their role, structure, dynamics, etc. It becomes
almost impossible to outline the boundaries of the concept. Probably, it is
not a term at all, and we should abandon its conceptual roots and speak
about all the listed phenomena only nominalistically describing them,
shouldn’t we? But even when we would try to avoid this word, it will
pursue us of speaking about “members” or “participants”. So what we
need in this situation as scholars is probably not to escape the vagueness
of the term "community", but to face it, analyze its controversies and
Book Review                                                              179
make the boundaries more evident and clear.
     This was one of the challenges taken by Annalisa Pelizza in her book
Communities at crossroads. The book was written between 2007 and
2009, so now it “can be read under the lens of a double archaeology” (p.
6), witnessing those processes and addressing that period’s view
backward from both 2009 and the present time. Readers can also enable
their own historical approach to analyze the difference between that
period and the contemporary times. However, the book is not historical,
it is rather conceptual. The author’s ambition is more than just the
“online community analysis”. Pelizza, indeed, “raises questions […] to
[...] the foundations of 21st century social theory on the demise of social
engagement and sense of community prompted by technological
societies” (p. 149).
     The book starts with a theoretical investigation of what community is
and with the critical review of the myths and foundations of this term. In
the empirical part, the author follows the actors working in Linz (Austria)
with the archive of the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Community
competition for digital social projects, awarded in the framework of the
Ars Electronica Festival for Art, Technology and Society. Pelizza
undertakes a rather sophisticated analysis of the participants of these
competitions, who describe what is their community and why it deserves
to obtain a prize. The new understandings of a "community", that Pelizza
has found in the fieldwork, are contrasted with the “mythological”
history of the term, considered in the first part of the book. In the end,
Pelizza focuses on the different approaches to the understanding of
action going beyond the very communities she analyzes.
     The very problem of community, and how it is connected with action,
traces back to Frederic Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Pelizza
states that the distinction between these two types of sociality created a
problematic field for the theorists who followed, and brought, as well, a
“dystopic understanding of modern relations in contemporary
theorizations of online sociability” (p. 149). Dystopia here is more
connected with “society”, while “community” is its opposite, that people
have lost in the big cities world. Revisiting in this way such foundational
opposition, Pelizza’s book calls up Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the
Social, which from the very beginning challenges our understanding of
social as a part of binary. Communities at a Crossroads, indeed, follows
the same approach to the ontology as an inseparable, which is part of
Latour’s (2005) intellectual programs
     The literature review which follows has a specific critical aim. Pelizza
reconstructs the myth of the community and the internet (and networks
before it). She starts with Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual
Community and treats Rheingold’s communities as “rhetorical
performative endeavor to merge multiple streams in a coherent account
of online sociability” (p. 78). This endeavor seems to be undoubtedly
libertarian and based on the mythology that flourished around the online
180                                                        Tecnoscienza – 10 (2)

communities in the end of the 20th century. This mythology is traced back
to the cold-war cybernetics and to decentralisation attempts that were
inscribed in it. The key features of this particular understanding of
communities are the following: treating the internet as an “intrinsically
ungovernable machine, the creative coalition between knowledge workers
and internet companies, and the spontaneous interactions of internet
users producing wealth and political participation as well as
empowerment” (p. 147). Pelizza opposes Geert Lovink’s “organised
networks” to these concepts. However, this term does not itself replace
the dominating “communities”, rather being a critical alternative to it. .
    Looking at the following historical and epistemological changes,
Pelizza provides the reasons of the crisis of these myths: geography
matters, so that internet results to be more and more controlled and
territorialized, the emergence of a creative class related to the coalition
between knowledge workers and internet companies crumbled after the
Dotcom burst, the idea that digital commons might empower the most
disadvantaged ones failed.
    Despite these crises, the communities, as concept, persist and are
already embedded into those that followed and are still a rather popular
approaches to understanding the digital and contemporary sociality.
Pelizza focuses on the research projects carried out by Patrice Flichy,
Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman. Flichy’s project seems to be rather
productive from Pelizza’s point of view. She praises his reconstruction of
the early digital cultures on BBS, Fidonet, etc. and the taxonomy of
those, based on three features: “geographical proximity, institutional
belonging, degree of face-to-face knowledge''(p. 42). By contrast both
Wellman and Castells are treated as proponents of the mythological
approach. The main problem is the following one: the two authors
become not sensitive to the definition of the group and types of the
participants, focusing on the individual action, treating the internet as a
space and proposing an essentialistic understanding of the community.
However, Pelizza does not introduce here the idea that these different
metaphors (like “space” or the very notion of community “community”)
might themselves influence the research optics (Markham 1998; Van der
Boomen 2014).
    In order to provide a contrasting fieldwork-based argument, Pelizza
maps the words that people use to describe their communities, reveals the
relations among them and analyzes the cases more in detail. Then these
results are implemented in the theoretical discussion in order to oppose
the communities described by the people taking part in them to the
“mythological ones”. The approach works, for instance, when one “ideal”
locality does not turn to be so monolithic, but splits into two of them: the
rural and the urban and Pelizza is able to show it. Or, when she is able to
brings to the surface the “comparison between HCI, on one side, and
sociology of technology and semiotics, on the other side [...][A]ccording
to the first approach the subjects of communication pre-exist to the
Book Review                                                              181
interactive process, according to the second school subjectivity gets
installed through the communicational process” (p. 111). This
comparison will be important to further develop the key argument about
the definition of technology as mediator or intermediary.
    The mapping of the diversity allows to introduce the new criteria to
define the online assemblages of software and rules, such as open
accounts, regimes of access and visibility that extend the more classical
one-to-one or one-to-many. Pelizza also redefines the software as the one
that “can articulate the processes whereby a digital assembly is gathered,
and different actors are enacted” (p. 143). Such a definition is a step aside
from technological determinism and social constructivism, that allows not
to lose materiality, as it often happens with the projects on STS and
media (see Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot 2004, as an important
endeavor to problematize this).
    In the final part of the book, Pelizza suggests a map and some
theoretical outcomes. The most evident one is replacing the dichotomy of
community/society with a variety of groups and flexible types of sociality.
Explaining this variety, Pelizza suggests the new coordinates: stressing
“the degree of permeability of the distinction between Addresser and
Addressees, Members, and Outside”, this map can turn out useful in
evaluating the most innovative and progressive digital assemblages” (p.
152).
     As an internet studies researcher I find this mapping already useful,
but going beyond this mapping, Pelizza provides a theoretical
understanding of how the social itself might be thought in a different
way. She stresses the double role of the digital artifacts: “the distinction
between 'mediation' – a relationship that constitutes actors while taking
place – from 'intermediation' – a relationship in which a tool just
transports agency from one pre-existing point to another pre-existing
point” (p.97). This distinction allows to view different projects and types
of social relations and to understand them in a more precise way. This
also allows to criticize not only the myths, but also the media and
organizations, like Electronic Frontier Foundation (p. 124).
    The theoretical ambition of the book is in the end to reassemble the
understanding of the social action. Pelizza concludes that “[m]ore than
marking the end of social and political commitment, information
artefacts, and digital platforms mediate different types of relationships
and enact different types of communities. From case to case, information
technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures can be conceived of as tools,
goals, supporters” (p. 150).
    This theoretical claim might seem trivial, as it is rather clear that the
material interfaces, platforms and infrastructures are differently
participating in the assembling of what we call social. However, if the
terms like “software”, “technology”, “machine” could be re-explained
critically at least to some degree, it might be helpful.
    The problem I see is that defining the “technological” part of the
182                                                            Tecnoscienza – 10 (2)

community only as mediator or intermediary is again considering as
problematic field the social as opposed to the technological. What might
be helpful is to bring the same lenses used to look at “community”, to
look at “digital”.
    The only further problem with such a program might be a political
one. Pelizza’s approach is quite helpful in distinguishing communities,
which might transform into movements and enable more democratic
participation. The reassembled “digital” – i.e. “digital” seen under
Pelizza’s lenses – might turn on the counterparts of the criticized myths,
like the centralization of power and new alliances, e.g. government and
business. Then, what we see in contemporary political processes of
different countries might be at the same time understood and legitimized.


References
Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K. A. (eds.) (2014) Media Technologies.
        Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Cambridge, MIT
        Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-
       Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Markham, A. N. (1998) Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual
      Space, Lanham, Altamira.
Van den Boomen, M. V. (2014) Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter
      in New Media, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures.



                                      ***

   M. Puig de la Bellacasa
Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Min-
neapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 280

Stefano Crabu Politecnico di Milano

    Few years ago, I got deeply engaged with my colleague Paolo Ma-
gaudda in a qualitative research focusing on the development of a grass-
roots community network (CN) in Italy, originally started in Rome in
2001 under the name of “Ninux.org” to then expand to other Italian cit-
ies (see Crabu and Magaudda 2017). CNs are commonly considered as a
case of “inverse” infrastructure (Egyedi and Mehos 2012), characterised
by being built and self-managed by communities of voluntary people
