Also, in response to the comment by Will–the East Bay Express story is accompanied by an editor’s note saying that it’s real.

bq. Intentionally building communities (More hallway!)

bq. If you think about the tribes you belong to, most of them are side effects of experiences you had doing something slightly unrelated. We have friends from that summer we worked together on the fishing boat, or a network of people from college or sunday school. There’s also that circle of people we connected with on a killer project at work a few years go.

bq. These tribes of people are arguably a more valuable creation than the fish that were caught or the physics that were learned, right?

bq. And yet, most of the time we don’t see the obvious opportunity–if you intentionally create the connections, you’ll get more of them, and better ones too. If the hallway conversations at a convention are worth more than the sessions, why not have more and better hallways?

bq. What would happen if trade shows devoted half a day to ‘projects’? Put multi-disciplinary teams of ten people together and give them three hours to create something of value. The esprit de corps created by a bunch of strangers under time pressure in a public competition would last for decades. The community is worth more than the project.

bq. The challenge is to look at the rituals and events in your organization (freshman orientation or weekly status meetings or online forums) and figure out how amplify the real reason they exist even if it means abandoning some of the time-honored tasks you’ve embraced. Going around in a circle saying everyone’s name doesn’t build a tribe. But neither does sitting through a boring powerpoint. Working side by side doing something that matters under adverse conditions… that’s what we need.

One more historical thing to add to the mix: soon after writing my comment, I came across a tribal reference in Dominic Boyer’s very nice PPP “Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy (and was reminded of how far back the whole “Tribe” Trope goes, in fact, back to one important intellectual grandfather of this “brand” of media studies, McLuhan who put the T in Tribe in the following terms during an interview (pp. 19-20 in Boyer’s book):

“These new media have made our world into a single unit” The world now is like a continuously sounding tribal drum where everyone gets the message all the time.

Am: Why Marshall, do you use the word “tribal”?

MM: Well, I think you find everything we’ve observed tonight abut the media points in the direction of tribal man and away from individual man.

AM: By individual man I suppose you are reffering to literary man/

MM: Yes and tribal man in the man created by the new electronic media… Yes, we’re retribalizing… [You get the point]

A good reminder that the (problematic) forging of the electronic and the tribal is not really all that new.

Thus ‘tribe’ becomes for them a certain imagination of authentic communion, rather than any actually-existing group that they might know about and compare themselves to. It it is the lack of any actual comparison with other social forms (except those they imagine themselves to be revolting against) that is the problem.

Actually, since these ‘tribesmen’ imagine themselves to be egalitarian, nomadic, etc. etc. I vote for ‘band’ as the proper incorrect label. We need a book called “virtual bands: original affluent societies online”

It seems to me that word Tribe reflects a missing set of categories: I think it might be useful to linguistically and analytically differentiate between everyday uses of new media technologies that while certainly transformative of some practice (mall shopping vs Internet shopping but in the end both practice are still shopping) vs those formations and social manifestation that would not exist, could not exist without the technologies (hacking, 4Chan, Internet memes,Second Life, certain types of political activism etc etc). I have somewhat clumsily (and perhaps problematically) referred to those latter examples that rely completely and fundamentally on digital media as indigenous formations of new media, all the while also trying to get away from treating them as exceptional or more authentic by also pointing how those formations are still tied into currents that have nothing to do with digital media. And as important recognizing that unless we take into account how indigenous groups and non-western societies use new media, we will continue to sustain the very large blinders that are already so pervasive in new media studies.

Anyhow, I am still thinking about what word might be useful to use to capture this idea that technology has indeed produced social formations, even cultural groups, that simply could not exist without these technologies without falling into really problematic language and terms such as Tribe.

My guess is that it’s because people are struggling to find words to describe some of the new stuff they’re seeing in terms of group activity (esp online, but also offline) in work and life. (As another commenter said — the word “community” gets used a lot too, with similarly wide and non-specific meanings.)

We/our broader society just doesn’t have the language to describe some of these new kinds of relationships and groups, so we co-opt / adopt / bend existing words (such as “friends/friending”, “community,” “tribe,” “link,” etc.).

The example you give above actually describes this perfectly — where the authors talk about their mental model for “tribe” as something they absorbed from TV & movies. (And yeah, that has nothing to do with actual indigenous people’s experiences — but that’s not the point of their book, either.)

Yes, part of this is ignorance, co-option/colonization etc. But many/most words tend to change meanings and connotations over time. Most people today using words like “assassin” and “avatar” and all kinds of words that used to have certain historical or linguistic meanings — and for the broader public, those words have become unmoored/disconnected from those old meanings.

So it seems little misplaced to expect these kinds of books to include >>>close readings of Morton Fried and collaborative approaches with an array of indigenous groups<<< You were kidding about that, right?

Because of course you know that’s not a reasonable expectation to have for these kinds of books. These are mainstream non-fiction books, using common language/folk language to discuss societal trends. It’s like reading Rachael Ray and being disappointed that it’s not a footnoted academic treatis on the history of cooking.

These books are great for what they are — popular mainstream writing — but they’re not rigorous academic works. They serve a different purpose.

2) I have Electronic Tribes and have perused a few chapters of it. I’m not horribly impressed at the moment, partially for the reason you stated; there’s no comparison to a present-day “tribe” and their definition leaves a bit to be desired. When it comes to thinking of what to call our online formations, i like your co-blogger Kelty’s idea of the ‘recursive public’ much better than i like “tribe.” i also tend to be partial to “community” but that’s a messy term that i’m trying to find a way to un-mess a bit. If i manage to succeed, no one will be more surprised than i.

that is a great observation. however, i’m not an anthropologist, and i haven’t the faintest notion of what a tribe is defined (or not defined) as. could you perhaps elucidate, especially in comparison with the above works, and possibly talk about the consequences of using folk definitions of the word?