Sociology and the Internet communities

Beyond the giants like MySpace there are millions of micro level internet communities that are even more concentrated in the types of people that form the society and the guidelines they’ve created for interacting within it. Asking questions like what influences have brought them together or if there is a common cause will help you better understand the culture behind the internet community. What people share is part of the creation of a society. Socialization is the term for the creation of these shared symbols and beliefs.

Another interesting area of study of sociology on the internet is concerning online poker, and the government's role in censorship. There is an intriguing article about the (im)proper role of government censorship posted at the Northwestern law review. The legislation, signed into law on October 13th, 2006 by President Bush, is highly controversial amongst political pundits and poker advocates alike.

The purpose for the internet community will also direct the behavior of its members greatly. Was the community formed as a purely social network or one for education, building business relations, politics, sharing do it yourself projects? If you’re unsure, the applied sociology method of archival research could help you dig up when the internet community began, what its original mission was, past forum discussions and more.

Perhaps the best way to understand and get a feeling for an internet community is by the applied sociology method of participant observation. By actually getting on the site and interacting with others you’ll get a first-hand experience as to what the internet community is like and how the members interact. And today this isn’t limited to text communication. We can now stream voice and pictures over the internet instantly allowing us to not only speak and see each other but also instantly share video and audio files as well to help us communicate our ideas and share them with one another.

The internet has changed how we communicate in general. There are functions for filtering content, for excluding foul language and even to block a person from communicating all together. We are learning to communicate within new confines as well as societies with few boundaries. As we’ve become more comfortable with these changes in communication they’ve begun stretching beyond the computer into the real world.

Sociologists are just now gaining the ability to measure how communication through the internet alters the way we communicate in person. The lack of physical interaction and anonymity of communicating online had become a growing concern. This is especially true for the younger generation who has never known life without these internet communities and news ways of communicating.

Regardless of whether the affects internet communities have on real life societies are positive or negative the one thing that’s certain is it has forever altered our perception of what a society is.

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Acquiring the Sociological Imagination

The sociological perspective enables us to develop a sociological imagination. That is, knowing how social forces affect our lives can prevent us from being prisoners of those forces. C. Wright Mills (1959), an American sociologist, called this personal use of sociology the sociological imagination—the ability of individuals to see the relationship between events in their personal lives and events in their society.  

What is gained by using our sociological imagination? People do not make decisions, big or small, in isolation. Historically, for example, American society has shown a strong bias against childless and one-child marriages. Couples without children have been considered selfish, and an only child has often been labeled “spoiled” (Benokraitis, 1999). These values date back to a time when large families were needed for survival. Most people lived on family farms, where children were needed to help with the work. Furthermore, many children died at birth or in infancy. People responded to society’s needs by having large families. Now, as the need for large families is disappearing, we are beginning to read about benefits of one-child families—to the child, to the family, and to society. This change in attitude is reflected in the decrease in family size.

The sociological imagination helps us understand the effects of events, such as the social pressures just discussed, on our daily lives. With this understanding, we are in a better position to make our own decisions rather than merely conform (Erikson, 1997; Game and Metcalfe, 1996). This social awareness permits us to read the newspaper with a fuller understanding of the events. Instead of interpreting a letter opposing welfare as an expression of someone with no compassion, we might instead see the writer as a person who places great importance on independence and selfhelp. The sociological imagination questions common interpretations of human social behavior. It challenges conventional social wisdom—ideas people assume are true.

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