This is important work for its own sake. It is also interesting as an
example of what on-line communicative communities via a technology afford.
Measures of personal bodily security -- a key issue when we admit that
fundamental cultural classifications are policed in fact by violence in our
society as in (almost?) all others (real taboos are the ones people try to
kill or hurt you for breaking). Varieties of freedom from being labeled
(preparatory to being hurt), from demands for single identities, for
anonymities of various sorts. Connectivity across distance and time to make
true communities for low density groups (whether it's 1 in 10 or more than
that). Freedom for 'minors' from the policing of family in structures that
basically still deny, even among the most enlightened in our dominant
culture, basic human rights on the basis of age discrimination (masking
economic and political domination of at least the 13-18 cohort of society,
if not those still younger as well). If I were a programmer, my first
priority right now would be defeating the censorship software that
right-wing alarmism is trying to foist on all of us using the weakness in
our liberal armor that we still don't recognize age-relations in our
society as oppression, but see them as 'natural'. This is undoubtedly a
larger and more contentious issue even than 'gay rights' (i.e. oppression
on the basis of sexual orientation _and_ preference), but it is highlighted
whenever there are cultural crises of this sort. (There is of course a
mirror image issue for the 70+ age cohort, elder abuse, etc. but at least
the law has not yet legimitated this form of oppression, though it is
trying, e.g. mandatory retirement efforts, health care limitations,
committal for 'senility' etc.)
These Gay-Straight Alliance networks seem to illustrate phenomena like the
emergence of new patterns of organization when communicative coupling is
increased in a social system. New organizational groups, like xmca itself,
are being created at an unprecedented rate on an unprecedented scale (in
many sense, not including the size of membership of the groups, which is
probably a good thing). The geographical extension of these groups has
raised all sorts of critical issues which are being hotly discussed these
days in political science, area studies, anthropology and sociology, etc.
An interesting introduction to them can be found, for instance, in Arjun
Appadurai's _Modernity at Large_ (1996, U of Minn Press) -- a boring title,
a book of very uneven essays, but incredibly significant issues and
perspectives. The new style communities (and they come of course in
different forms) are not only to some extent autonomous from local and
familiar controls, but represent powerful peer-group-like competitors for
allegiance -- even on some scale representing a serious threat to the
nation-state organization of global society. (I don't mean GSAs, yet, but
read Appadurai etc. on global diasporic communities.)
Qualitatively new social phenomena engender (hmm) new paradigms of social
theory and analysis, much as new art forms call up new critical discourses.
"Your sons and your daughters are beyond your control ... for the times,
they are a'changin ..." -- not just wishful thinking, I'd say.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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