Modernity, Social Relations and Imagined Communities

May 15 2001

Introduction:

“Information society” is one of the most popular terms of the present sociological discussion. Besides knowledge work and information economy, network interaction is a recently discussed topic in research and theory.

Considering the wide spreading of communication technology, it has to be assumed that it also has an influence on society – the technology is changing the society. Or is the society changing the technology? Is the way we use technical devices influenced by the technology? Or is the technology influencing the way of its use?

“Online interaction creates new forms of deceit and new ways to establish identities. And despite the new freedoms of online interaction, old institutions and stereotypes are reproduced, sometimes in exaggerated forms.” (Communities in Cyberspace, p.23)

So the question is: are modes of online interaction a new type of social reality or is it simply the transfer of the “traditional” social world to a new medium? I found a very interesting approach to this discussion in essays by Craig Calhoun. He is discussing the aspects of modern age that can still be found in what often is called “postmodern” and makes the question of social integration central to his perspective. Are the types of social integration changing or is only the way of its transmission or realization changing?

In my essay I want to present Calhoun’s approach to the question of social relations in the present information age. For the discussion about imagined communities I also refer to the classical study about nationalism by Benedict R. Anderson, “Imagined communities”. Further literature has indirectly influenced my work, the main titles are mentioned in the bibliography.

1.Indirect interaction as a feature of modern societies

Modernity, society and modern society are the three terms I want to describe and discuss in this first chapter. It’s the theoretical framework for my presentation of the social reality in modern societies and the basic definition of what we are talking about.

1.1. Are we still modern?

In sociology we are far from consensus about whether we presently have a period of postmodernism or if we are still in modern age – some scientists, as Bruno Latour, even state that we have never been modern. The term of modernism is often connected to the industrialized society and rationalization, but there is no common sense on the question where modernism ends and postmodernism starts.

In his essay “The Infrastructure of Modernity”, Craig Calhoun is discussing the shift from direct relationships towards indirect ones as a sign, proofing that we never even left the modern age:

“[�] [N]o basic shift in the form of social integration such that a new sort of society might reasonably be declared to exist. The changes that have occurred and are occurring are more or less of a piece with the changes that have occurred throughout the modern age.” (Calhoun 1992, p.225)

What, among other reasons, makes people defining the present age as postmodern is the fact, that after times of industrialization the new shift is informationalization. As the reorganization of the world by rationalized industrial work, the new information and network technology also brings along an evident change of social structures, norms and systems.

Calhoun is far from dividing the industrial and informational ages into modern and postmodern times. He even defines a high rate of social change as a feature of modernity – a change that has started in early industrialization and is still going on.

1.2. Society as interpersonal relationships

Schütz described society as a space of interactions, where social action is a subjectively meaningful behaviour, directed and oriented toward the practices of other individuals.

Physical action and communication are the two most important ways of interaction, of social action. Nowadays, technology-mediated communication is used for a huge part of social action, social action is not only based on face-to-face contacts.

The system of communicational contacts that connect a group of people is usually defined as social network. Individuals are connected to each other in various ways; if all the contacts of every member of that group is taken into account, we see a huge net. There are interaction strings, nodes, hubs, multipliers and also dead links (also people who are outside the system are part of these networks, as an out-group; see also the famous sociological question whether a hermit is part of society or not). They altogether form a flexible structure, a space of interactions, in my definition this is the space where “society” happens.

This “space of society” is the system, where all social action is happening, it is the social reality of every individual that is involved in it. If we take a closer look to all the described elements of that network, we notice that the interaction strings with all their links build an entity of different ways of interaction. Some of these strings represent a physical contact, others a mimic or linguistic interaction. Also the ways of transmissions are various, from face-to-face contacts to technology-mediated, long distance interactions.

“Almost all major premodern forms of social organization depended primarily on direct interpersonal relationships.” (Calhoun 1991, p.102)

So these personal relationships, that were originally realized in “face-to-face copresence” and are nowadays often transmitted by technical devices, are the classical backbone of social organization. These contacts are actualised normally in direct interpersonal interaction.

But the modern age brought along a new feature that overcame some of the classical social arrangements. Modernity is strongly connected with the growth of large-scale social organization, the development of physical and administrative infrastructure and knowledge enabled institutions beyond interpersonal relations to grow.

1.3. The Modern age – a growth of indirect social relations

In Calhoun’s view, society in general is a question of social integration. Following his thoughts, the growing importance of indirect social relationships is a meter for the upcoming of modernity.

Those are:

large-scale markets (considered as a self-regulating system)
closely administered organizations
bureaucracy
corporations (as “remarkable cultural artefact”)
information technologies

What is common to all these indirect relationships is the fact, that social action in these systems is not transmitted directly. There is no such system that one person is behaving in a subjective meaningful way and the other person, the recipient, is recognizing it as a subjective meaningful behaviour. In this system of indirect relations, there are still people as actors, but their action is no longer meaningful in itself, the meaning is transferred to the abstract system.

To give an example: If a tax office employee is controlling the tax calculation of a company, this is a kind of social action. There is some input (the tax forms), the employee is “processing” the data and then giving output in writing down possible errors and open questions. But this string of social action has no subjective social meaning for the employee. This is not a scheme of action and reaction, but the work he is doing only becomes meaningful in the context of a huge system of bureaucracy, laws and the huge organizational apparatus of a tax office.

The indirect relationships do not replace the direct ones, but they are changing their meaning and their sociological significance – direct relationships are, although sociopsychologically and culturally powerful as ever, no longer constitutive of society at its widest reaches.

The basic structure of the system called “modern society” is controlled by impersonal institutions. Even though there are, of course, people working in these organizations, these are so abstract to a certain extent, that they can still be called impersonal (as the tax office described before).

If we now state that modernism is connected to the emergence of impersonal social relationships, we have to remember Calhoun’s sentence I cited in the beginning of this chapter: The present social changes are not the birth of a new social system, but the change of its forms.

2. Imagined Communities and “Lebenswelt”

In chapter one, I defined the “modern society” as a system of indirect relationships. Now I want to put the question how these fit into a world, where we are in permanent unmediated contact with our social environment – a world that is far from the described anonymous and abstract institutions of modernism. Also it has to be discussed, what is the unifying aspect in this kind of society?

2.1. The construction of community

People who don’t even know each other can have a strong feeling of community. This is related to modernity and has its roots in the indirect relations. For example, if we think about the idea of nations – what makes people feeling as belonging together as a nation, even though they might come from places that are hundreds of kilometres away from each other, might believe in different gods and belong to completely different age groups and cultural environments? There is something connecting them� In this case it is a huge, impersonal institution – the conception and apparatus of a nation.

What are the basic preconditions for the growth of an imagined community? Mainly two aspects, closely related to each other, have to be mentioned:

the coordination of action through indirect relationships and
the formation of an identity as members of imagined communities.

Since in these huge groups, as nations for example, not all people know each other, there has to be an institution that is common to all the individuals. These are in general organizations of indirect relationships. Where in ancient times a whole village was meeting at dusk to discuss urgent topics, we nowadays have a parliament where elected spokesmen of the population meet and decide. This is a good example of an indirect relationships – the individual is electing a person that is meeting all the other elected persons and they make decisions for the whole nation.

Without the existence of these large-scaled institutions, a feeling of an imagined community wouldn’t be possible.

The second aspect has also to be taken into account. Not every institution is leading its members to a feeling of an imagined community. The institution has to be established with the goal to form an imagined community.

2.2. “Lebenswelt” and competing forms of social integration

When discussing about interpersonal and impersonal relations, it is only a short way to include Habermas’ conception of “lifeworld” to the argumentation:

“Indirect relations and imagined communities are the key to an increasing split between everyday life and large-scale systemic integration” (Calhoun 1991, p.96).

The growing amount of organizations and institutions, interfering the social reality, opens up a gap between the “lifeworld” of the individual and the system itself: The meaning of the large-scaled systems is unclear, due to missing links to the understanding of “everyday local life” – the patterns of understanding from the world of direct relations can not be used analogue to the large-scale action and integration:

“Rather, the point is that understandings derived from the world of everyday, direct social interaction are likely to be increasingly distorting when applied to the world of large-scale social integration and action.” (Calhoun 1991, p.97)

In context of the indirect relations, there are two competing forms of social integration: systemic and social. While the social reality of every individual is still based on direct interpersonal action, the indirect institutions of abstract systems are simultaneously influencing its lifeworld.

“We are led to an apparently more rationalistic orientation to action” Calhoun states in reference to Max Weber. “Action” indeed gets a new – or better: second – meaning. It is not only the action towards a communicational partner, it is also the “input” to a complex system that is processing social action in a more or less bureaucratic or static way.

3. The four worlds

The “four worlds” defined by Calhoun stand for four different modes of relationships. The borders between them are fluent and a strict categorization is maybe not their main idea, but they give an interesting overview on the different graduations of indirect interaction, by a weak classification into four groups – an overview that is supposed to guide to the presentation of actual socio-technological changes later in this essay (in the fourth chapter).

3.1. The world of directly interpersonal relations

This is the world of actual or potential face-to-face interaction. While actual face-to-face interaction means a personal interaction with some person, the potential face-to-face interaction stands for all the interpersonal interaction that might take place, but doesn’t – for example, when we meet a stranger on the street but don’t interact with him (in fact, no interaction is also some kind of interaction!).

Important to mention, that also a telephone call or sending a letter is part of this world. It’s not face-to-face, but individual-to-individual and thereby a direct interpersonal relation.

3.2. The world of imagined personal connection

In this “second level” we already join the world of institutionally mediated interaction. Imagined personal connections are somehow mediated, for example by television. The presenter of the news on TV seems to be in a personal connection to the people in the living rooms at home, but in fact this is just an imagined connection. If thinking about the situation analytically, the presenter is reading texts that aren’t his own work to a camera, from where his image is transmitted to millions of screens all over the world, where millions of “consumers” watch him.

3.3. The one-directional world of active relationships

Another kind of relationship is the one-directional one. It’s a social process where two sides are involved, but one of the sides has more control than the other.

A classical example is surveillance, social surveillance such as surveillance at work, or technical surveillance as for instance monitoring of data or processes.

3.4. The world of systemic integration or coordination

This “world” is the illusion of not involving human action or interpersonal power into certain social processes. The best examples were already mentioned before: large-scaled companies and organizations, anonymous bureaucracies and institutions. It’s that range of social action that is so abstract from ancient forms of human interaction that it can not be anymore recognized as a accumulation of social action, but it appears as a social apparatus itself.

4. Information technology

After discussing the role of indirect interaction for modern societies, their different forms and the related problems, this chapter wants to build a bridge to the starting point of this essay: New modes of online interaction.

Calhoun summarizes the role of new technology as extending the basic trends in social integration: Not a new age or a new kind of society, but a quantitative and qualitative change in social integration has taken place and is the object for sociological analysis.

Whilst offering fascinating opportunities for a more flexible life and for the advanced establishment of abstract interaction, this new dimensions of social life might also cause several problems:

“The world of direct interaction, especially primary relationships, remain emotionally central to people in the most advanced modern societies and at the heart of most people’s evaluative frameworks.” (Calhoun 1991, p.101)

As the problems that emerge between the “lifeworld” of individuals and huge abstract institutions (discussed in chapter two), there are also problems to be expected between the face-to-face interaction and technology-mediated interaction – people still orientate their social thinking at “ancient” variables, such as direct or unmediated interaction.

To discuss these aspects of new communication technology is the aim of this capter.

Before talking about the potentials and problems of the technology, I’ll drop some lines about tertiary and quaternary relationships. This terminology is based on the definition of primary and secondary relationships by Charles H. Cooley whilst the first stands for emotionally intense direct relations as for example in a family or among friends, the latter describes the emotionally neutral, performance-orientated relations in formally organized social groups.

4.1. Tertiary relationships

These are relationships everybody experiences when using telephones and internet, even when leaving someone a message on a sheet of paper: No physical copresence is required and interaction is technology-mediated.

Let me describe this kind of relationships and its effect by using the example of mobile phones:

In 2000, Timo Kopomaa published his book “The city in your pocket – Birth of the Mobile Information Society”, where he is describing the present situation in Finland. He describes the mobile phone as a provider of instant connections for instant communities:

To a certain extend, the mobile communication technology can replace face-to-face relations, it instantly unites a group of people without the necessity to meet each other personally. To use the picture of a social network once more, every person whose telephone number is saved in your mobile phone is part of your personal instant social network. But in addition, these networks are easily to extend: you simply dial another number than the ones saved in your phone book or you get a call from someone who has never called you before – and the instant network is growing. It’s “instant” because you can interact to everyone whenever you want, wherever you are and – most important – regardless of the distance to the communication partner.

In consequence, the mobile phone might be described as a “decentralized meeting place”. Social action can be transmitted “virtually”, people from all over can stay in instant contact without meeting each other at a common place (the meeting place is replaced by the network) – gossip, information, stories, feelings and all these elements of interpersonal contacts are exchanged continuously by text messages or telephone calls.

What is a main feature of these tertiary relationships, and what makes it different to quaternary ones, is that both / all parties involved are aware of the relationship. Maybe not in all its consequences, but at least users of these technologies recognize that they are part of an interaction system.

4.2. Quaternary relationships

So, the quaternary relationships are the ones outside of the attention / awareness of one or both parties, as for example monitoring of actions or data reanalysis. This conception is correlating to the “one-directional world of active relationships” mentioned in chapter 3.3.

In general, every kind of data traffic (which is a basic element of information technology) can be monitored and recorded by network operators or official institutions, such as intelligence services, police, military. The use of these data is in general limited by privacy law, but for example (anonymized) user profiles are already used today for statistics and internal use of the network companies.

Whilst the locating problem is a specifically new aspect of the mobile phone that is in everyone’s pocket and always sending location information to the central computer systems, the monitoring problem exists also in wire-based telephony, in telecopying and other classical transmission services. Even a letter or postcard can be scanned or read for its content.

But of course, if the information technology leads to an extended use of technological networks in social reality, the amount of information that might be monitored is growing. To the same extent the dependence on network providers is growing – if the network system is not working properly, this has serious consequences on a social life that has one of is backbones in computer-mediated interaction.

4.3. Potentials of new information technologies

Following the classification of tertiary and quaternary relationships, it becomes evident that there is a huge potential in these technologies. A capability for making communication easier for individuals, but also a for transferring the control about even more social processes to another “institution” – in this case a computer network.

Calhoun points out the four main potentials as follows (Calhoun 1992, p.221):

a) More organisation of social life through indirect relationships

When more and more people are connected to this communicational network, the effects of interaction transmitted over it also affect persons that are not directly involved in the current information exchange. The network acts as a hub, were singular social actions can have a much wider meaning than the subject can recognize.

b) Extending the power of various corporate actors

This is a quite simple idea: if “corporate actors” or institutions are handling – or, to express it in technical terms, processing – a bigger amount of social action, they also have more influence on the way they handle it. This is an empowerment of corporations, institutions and organizations, even though a hidden empowerment that can’t be noticed from outside.

c) Coordinating social action on a larger scale

This is exactly, what was mentioned in the description of institutionalised social action. The meaning is not in the action of an individual, but it emerges from the entity of connections, actions and structures.

d) Intensifying control within specific relationships

Some aspects of surveillance were mentioned above: localization of actors and filtering of information. Above and beyond we have to think of control over the access to or the use of the technology, use of information for other than the reason originally intended and so on.

Calhoun asks, whether the individual is in this system any more an independent actor or not:

“We might even consider that corporations are a kind of social automation. They are made possible by indirect relationships in which human functionaries serve as intermediates, but they are greatly expanded on the basis of new information technologies for the mediation of relationships.” (Calhoun 1992, p.223)

Is the human being reduced to a “social automat”? Considering the fact that modernity has brought along the automation of social processes by institutions, where actors inside these organizations are acting without a subjectively obvious meaning, the information network could be seen as an even bigger social institution – the institutionalisation of interpersonal relations. In this case, the individual person would in analogy not be anything more than a mediator of relationships – a social automat.

4.4. Unanswered questions

What makes research on present technologies so exciting is, that no one can predict the future development. Everything is developing so fast and also the effects on social life might be revised by any of the next introduced features.

Calhoun is mentioning a set of unanswered questions:

“new information technologies may facilitate the reversal of an ancient trend toward population concentration [�] Will this reversal take place? With what effects?”
“the [�] technologies offer an increased capacity for centralized surveillance and control. Will this be checked or balanced by new means of democratic participation?”
“What are the meanings and potentials of direct interpersonal relationships in an age in which so much of social life is constituted through indirect relationships?” (all: Calhoun 1992, p.232)

To summarize his “open questions”, he is on the one hand unsure if the high potential of the technology for the institutionalised reality of indirect relations will be used in a balanced way and what effect it might have on the people. Migrations and decentralization of lives is just one of the pictures drawn. On the other hand he is requesting the use of direct interpersonal communication in this reality.

Conclusion

I want to start my summary with the conclusion Calhoun writes in of one of his essays: He concludes, that the extension of social integration to an ever-larger scale is a dominant sociological trend of the modern era, coming along with greater internal intensity through indirect social relationships.

Following his argumentation, social integration in the modern age happens in institutionalised organizations. These might be companies, bureaucracies or whatever apparatuses of impersonal social organization. The scale of these institutions is growing constantly and the information technology is just another step in this development. It gives access to more and more social processes where indirect action replaces direct action. Indirect action, mediated by technological systems is much easier to integrate to an institutionalised system than direct action, because the “data” can be used and processed in various ways, without the “author” having any influence on it.

In addition, the growth of indirect relationships also enables the persons or institutions that are integrated in these systems to communicate more intensively. Besides affecting the quantity of the indirect relations, this will to a certain extent also influence their quality. Lastly, the rise of information technology does not bring a new trend, it just enlarges the capacity of the mentioned extensions.

Concerning the question of quantitative and qualitative change his statements are in my eyes somehow contradictive:

On the one hand, he states that social systems are extended beyond the bounds of locality and hereby information technology becomes central for modern sociology, not as a qualitative, but a quantitative break in social processes.

On the other hand he refers to Schütz who is cited as follows:

“The first steps beyond the realm of immediacy are marked by a decrease in the number of perceptions I have of the other person and a narrowing of the perspectives within which I view him” (cited from Calhoun 1991, p.101)

This would lead to the conclusion that there is also a qualitative change! In my opinion it is not possible to talk about a social change, that is including just a quantitative or just a qualitative change. A quantitative change, as the described increase of indirect action transmitted by the network systems, always results in a qualitative change – here: new indirect connections or additional transmission of information.

As mentioned in the beginning, Calhoun makes the question of social integration central to his article. He states, that the related questions can only be answered by analysing the varying forms and extent of social integration.

“[�] [L]arge-scale organizations are still part of social integration even if they are based on relationships over which participants have little control, of which they may not even be aware, and the results of which they might tend to reify.” (Calhoun 1992, p.232)

This is maybe the most important message of this approach – besides the conclusion that modernism is still present and there is no postmodern age (even though this is more a question of belief than a question that can be scientifically decided). All the institutions of the modern age are not disintegrating society, but they are a system of social integration. By including everybody to be a member of that system, society is integrated. As I presented in chapter 2, this can even lead to the emergence of a “community feeling”, but still there are the problems that a system – even if it’s an integrative system – is confusing the conception of an individual’s “lifeworld” if it can’t be aware of the processes:

“At the same time, it is increasingly difficult for people to make sense of the organization of large-scale social systems and collective actors on the basis of extensions or analogies from the understanding of everyday, local life.” (Calhoun 1991, p.96)

Bibliography:

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