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.
The setting for this book is the networked community. The treatment of the subject matter is broad and interdisciplinary, with contributions from computer science, sociology, design, human factors and communication technology.
The chapter contributors, drawn from across Europe and North America, offer a varied prospectus of commentary, critique, sociological enquiry, technological development and research findings, which provides a rounded account of the progressive intermingling of social and electronic networks.
The contributors discuss the ways in which the Internet affects both familial and social relationships, communal and civic involvement, social capital and work patterns and lifestyle. Civic intelligence is presented as a nascent concept from which future social networks of increased public advocacy, scrutiny and action may be sourced. Other reported developments include agent-based community systems to model and support communal memory and social knowledge.
The opening section provides a purview of the broad scene covered by the book, followed by discussions about the current state of connected communities. Following this there are case studies illustrating the different aspects of research, both sociological and technological, in this area. The final part reports the variety and the scope of technology-mediated human-to-human communication in a connected community setting today.
Patrick Purcell is a Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, where he is a member of the Intelligent Systems and Networks Group.
