Self-Forming and Self-Organizing Online Communities: Listening beyond Borders

• In Event: Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Theory

Abstract

During the past two decades, access to Information Communication Technology (ICT) and social media platforms have led to many new digital spaces for communicating - ranging from friendship groups, to chat rooms, to professional discussion boards, newsgroups, etc. The past couple of decades have also witnessed the growth and creation of many self-forming and self-organizing movements online, with their focus on shared humanitarian concerns and vulnerabilities leading to social listening across borders, and subsequent shared and emerging discourses. This edited volume will identify how applications and access to technology and social media platforms enable the creation of self-forming, self-organizing movements capable of sharing alternative discourses in advocating for diverse agendas. The project will explore the ‘digital landscapes,’ a term that refers to the “complex and overlapping contours of online information flows,”[1] and explain how actors navigate the geographies of this landscape, and whether and how they have the resources to do so.
This collection of essays aims to probe the socio-political stakes of online humanitarian groups by extending the current theorizations of social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1986; Luckin & Du Boulay, 1999) and how they apply to self-developing online movements. It aims to look at the ethical concerns and obligations that lie at the heart of developing digital commons – the challenge of value depletion or destruction that often takes away the vitality of the commons (Baylor & Johnson, 2003; Elliott & Lamm, 2002). For humanitarian self-organizing processes, it will be important to trace and establish the aspects of constructivism (collaborative engagement and negotiated goals, facilitation), as well as how online humanitarian communities (which are in many ways designed communities) establish and drive relationality and reciprocity goals. The book will bring together the discursive, ethical, and informational aspects of the digital landscape, to update academicians and policymakers on how content is produced, disseminated, and consumed as well as the emerging fault lines in this process.

Author

• Nalanda Roy, Georgia Southern University