Home Struttura Produzioni Pubblicazioni Corsi Aggiornamento Seminari Ricerca Progetti Materiale

Il Centro Linguistico I seminari COMUNITA' VIRTUALI COMMUNITIES AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: TWO CONCEPTS COMPARED Paolo FERRI Are we really on the threshold of a revolution which will upset all of our traditional ways of acting, whether intellectual, social or political? On the net, are new communities - of entertainment, of social, political and economic action - not to mention scientific research - coming to life? Do they constitute forms of aggregation, together with a true re-definition of collective behavior? Without trying to respond to these questions, I hope to provide a few useful elements to the debate in this paper which aims to compare the concept of virtual community as defined by various experts in the cyber field (William Gibbson, Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle, Pierre Lévy) with the concept of community as it has been analyzed in the tradition of sociological and philosophical thought from Durkheim and Tönnies to Jan Luc Nancy. In making this comparison, I will try to demonstrate that virtual communities - if integrated with and not intended as substitutes for "real" social relations - can represent a new way of communicative action capable of strengthening and perhaps even making more open and democratic the system of community, social and institutional relations within which all of us work. Torna al programma