COMMUNITY WITHOUT PROPINQUITY REVISITED - COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE URBAN PUBLIC SPHERE

Recent discussions of the Internet have touted ''virtual community'' a nd a capacity to enhance citizen power in democracies. The present ess ay (a) calls for a more rigorous understanding of community; (b) sugge sts that relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology ma y do more to foster ''categorical identities'' than they do dense, mul tiplex, and systematic networks of relationships; and (c) argues that an emphasis on community needs to be complemented by more direct atten tion to the social bases of discursive publics that engage people acro ss lines of basic difference in collective identities. Previous protes t movements have shown that communications media have an ambiguous mix of effects. They do facilitate popular mobilization, but they also ma ke it easy for relatively ephemeral protest activity to outstrip organ izational roots. They also encourage governments to avoid concentratin g their power in specific spatial locations and thus make revolution i n some ways more difficult.