The Ties that Bind……the appearance of portable video in the late 1960's and early 1970's led to a variety of claims about the potential for community media. The most important claim was that video in the hands of community members would allow people in various disenfranchised communities to have a voice. This claim was always stated in contrast to mainstream media which were viewed as one-way and intent on removing the rights of citizens to speak and be heard.

Keep in mind that communities are variously defined by the ties that bind people together. Cities are really agglomerations of villages, impersonal and personal at the same time. Urban environments are as much about the circulation of information as they are about the institutions that individuals share, work in and create. Cities are also very fragile environments largely dependent upon the good will of citizens at all levels of activity. So, communities change all of the time as do the means of communications that they use. There is a constant and ever widening and profoundly interactive exchange of information going on in any urban centre. The buzz is at many levels, from the most personal and familial to the public context of debate about local, national and international issues.

In the post 9/11 world, the two way flow of information and communication has become even more central to urban life. It is not just the appearance and then massive increase in the use of mobile technologies that has altered what communities do and how they see themselves, it is the non-stop and incessant commentaries by many different people on their own lives and the lives of others and on every aspect of the news that has altered both the mental and physical landscape that we inhabit. All of this however, is very fragile. In a world increasingly defined by the extended virtual spaces that we all use, social media platforms define the ties that bind.

In my last entry, I ended with the statement that only eleven percent of internet users actively engage with Twitter on a daily basis. Take a look at [this visualization ](http://informationarchitects.jp/) and you will notice that there are 140 people or organizations that dominate Twitter usage. This doesn't mean that everyone else is not twittering, it just suggests that the community of relationships developed through twitter is not as broad as one might imagine, nor is it as local as the notion of community would suggest. This idea of an extended space lengthens and widens the reach of a small number of people while everyone else essentially maintains the village approach to their usage. The key difference to earlier historical periods is that we imagine a far greater effect to our own words than is actually possible.

From time to time, such as during the Haiti crisis, the best elements of this new and extended social world comes to the fore. However, if you take a hard look at some of the research on news blogs you will discover that the vast majority link to legacy media and get most of their information from traditional sources. Even the categories used by bloggers retain the frameworks and terminology of the mainstream media.

Part of the irony here is that in order for blogs to move beyond these constraints, they would actually have to construct organizations capable of doing research and distinguishing between what is true and what is false. At the same time, the controlled anarchy of the Web allows information to seep through that might otherwise have been hidden or restrained. The total picture however is not as diverse as social media advocates would have us believe.