Networked Neighbourhoods: The Connected Community in Context

Patrick Purcell

nov 2007 · Springer Science & Business Media

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The intricate relationship between information technologies, community, and social memory is critical to a fuller understanding of the evolution of our societies. Telecommunications and information technologies modify the process of accessing and storing data and knowledge, and consequently they also modify our relationship with both social and historical m- ory. Our various virtual communities continue to expand on a planetary scale, and hence the neologism “Global Village”, while concurrently, their physical counterparts are progressively being contained within speci?c contexts and places, often referred to as a process of “localization”. And then, there is the unpredictable evolution of today’s communication s- tems, an evolution that has been de?ned by Albert Einstein as the third bomb of the 20th century, after the atomic bomb and the demographic bomb. Therefore, as communication systems continue to develop, we face new scenarioswithimpreciseboundaries,thatleadtoendlessnewopportunities for establishing the relationship between social memory, community, and information systems. How can the knowledge process dynamic, together with the storing and transmitting of information, sounds, and images through digital devices, affect the communal memory and the way we both conceive of and create communities? We have at least three emerging paradigms that help us to understand the phenomena concerning the evolution of social memory linked with the recent diffusion of communication technologies.