Sociology is the study of human relations and human interactions, with the ‘community’ as one of the central units of sociological analysis. In very general terms, a community may be understood as a group of people having some common characteristics and interests. However, there is hardly any consensus about the definition of community among sociologists. A community has been understood variously as a social group, a cultural category, and a political collective by various scholars at different points in time. To this, a fourth category of a ‘technological community’ is added in contemporary discussions about the community, referring to communities created on the internet (Delanty, 2010).

The relationship between technology and community has been debated and discussed in sociology for a long time. For a while, technology was seen as antithetical to community life. The very inception of sociology as a discipline was in the background of apprehensions regarding the fate of the social community with the coming of modern technology and modern ways of life accompanying it. Early sociologists such as Tonnies (1887: 22) lamented the loss of the Gemeinschaft, the pre-modern, face-to-face community, with the coming of modern industrial technology where all social relations became a ‘purely mechanical construction’. However, Durkheim (1933) through his concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity showed that social communities may be of different types in different social and technological contexts. Such works paved the way for scholars to examine the relationship between community and technology in different ways, with some such as Benedict Anderson (1983) even prioritising the role of new technology in creating a different type of community.

Anderson spoke about how the coming of print capitalism allowed people across a country to read in one language and ‘imagine’ each other as one national community with common interests, shared identity and a sense of belonging. The community, in such a conceptualisation, is an ‘imagined community’; not in the sense of being fake or artificial, but one stemming from a conscious imagination and feeling of belonging among the members of the community. Extending this theory to the contemporary context, we can understand social groups on the internet as imagined communities of such kinds.

The internet, today, allows social actions across the globe by creating a ‘despatialised simultaneity’ (Thompson, 2005). That is to say, the internet allows people across the globe to communicate and interact with each other without any temporal lag irrespective of their geographical locations. In fact, the online virtual community goes beyond Anderson’s conceptualisation. No longer are we restricted to linguistic or politically created national boundaries. On the one hand, it allows diasporas to create or participate in communities around the homeland, real or imagined. On the other hand, the internet allows for the formation of different types of communities, based on various shared characteristics or interests, irrespective of national borders. There can be communities based on professional expertise; communities political affiliations; communities of people sharing common interests such as book clubs or sports enthusiasts; fan communities around films, actors, music bands; and many, many others – all without any restrictions of geography. Further, linguistic constraints have also loosened, with the development of internet-specific slangs and codes, emojis and emoticons, memes and GIFs, and easily accessible subtitles and translations. This allows the internet to be a fertile platform for the creation and continuation of various kinds of social groups.

Moreover, not only communities specific to the internet, but social groups which exist in the physical world find expressions in the virtual platforms as well. From video calls with friends and family to ordering food online, banking services to live-tracking maps, filling official forms to performing prayers in temples remotely, interactions in the offline world are carried over into the online and vice-versa. In the present times, social interactions on the internet have become part of people’s everyday lives, much like their offline interactions. Manuel Castells’s (2004) work on Network Society suggests that the distinction between the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ is redundant. The digital in the present times is only an extension of the physical world and rather than being in opposition simply expands the capacities of the later – the virtual in a way becomes part of our reality, what Castells refers to as ‘real virtuality’.

In the past year, this has become truer than ever before. Following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries including India announced stringent lockdown measures. As a result most social and economic activities that required people to gather together, barring the bare minimum deemed necessary for survival by governments, were prohibited. Even as the restrictions are gradually being eased and re-imposed in different areas, most activities remain suspended. People have been encouraged to follow what has come to be popularly termed as ‘social distancing’ – avoiding any form of physical contact with others and maintaining officially recommended distances and number limits in various types of gatherings. Given the scenario, many quickly turned to the internet to carry out activities that couldn’t be carried out in the physical world anymore. Businesses were being run almost entirely via online interactions; courts transferred to virtual forums; classrooms shifted to e-classes via various apps and websites; films and television shows were shot online with mobile phones and produced remotely via various digital tools. While many of these activities had been possible online even earlier, during the lockdown the internet went from being an alternative to a primary mode of carrying them out. The UNHRC had in 2016 passed a non-binding resolution suggesting that the internet is a basic human right. The pandemic reiterated that in the current world scenario, the internet is no longer to be seen as a luxury, but a necessity; and online communities are equally important as those offline.

However, to suggest that communities are formed online does not necessarily mean that the virtual space is a completely democratic one. If the virtual is to be understood as an extension of the real, then it should not be a surprise that the hierarchies and marginalisations in the physical world are in several cases carried onto the virtual as well. The digital divide in India, though gradually narrowing, is far from bridged, and the lockdown has simply highlighted the deep fissures in the access to the internet among the population. According to data from the World Bank by 2019 on 34 per cent of Indians were using internet services. Further, even with access to technology, the ‘social openness’ (West, 2016) is to be questioned – whether they are able to participate in and express themselves on online platforms or not. Even within online communities hierarchies, conflicts and antagonisms are commonplace.

To apply Nancy Fraser’s (1990) critique of the Habermasian public sphere to the virtual communities, conflict and disruptions are to be seen not as accidental but constitutive. Rather than seeing the internet as an undifferentiated field, one should see the online communities as unequal groups much as communities existing in the physical world. As most scholars today agree, an internally cohesive and uniform community without social, cultural and power hierarchies, neither exists on the internet nor outside of it. A sociological conceptualisation of the communities must allow for understanding their internal differentiations and complexities. Therefore, to suggest that the online platforms would be less of communities due to conflicts and hierarchies would be perhaps incorrect.

Thus, it becomes important for sociologists to recognise the growing importance of online platforms and internet-based communities. Neil Postman (1993: 20) said ‘new technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about.  They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with.  And they alter the nature of the community: the arena in which thoughts develop’. The internet as a technology has not simply added to our ways of communication and interactions, they have in many ways reshaped and transformed existing modes of interactions and rendered them into digital forms – what Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (2005) referred to as ‘sociodigitisation’. Much like ethnographic work today cannot afford to ignore the digital either in its content or methodologies, the sociological conceptualisation of communities can no longer completely disregard looking at online platforms.

References:

• Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
• Castells, M. (Ed.). 2004. The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited: Northampton.
• Delanty, G.Community. 2010. London: Routledge.
• Durkheim, E. 1933. The Division of labour in Society. Glencoe: The Free Press.
• Latham, R. and S. Sassen (Ed.s). 2005. Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Postman, N. 1993. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books.
• Thompson, J.B. 2005. ‘The New Visibility’. In Theory, Culture & Society 22 (6): 31–51.
• Tonnies, F. 2001 [1887]. Community and Civil Society. Translated by J. Harris and M. Hollis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pratichi Majumdar has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is currently working with the GenV Project as part of the India Team at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi.