Understanding Community: thoughts and experiences of young people

Abstract

This ethnographic study of members of Generation X and Generation Y seeks to explore the ways they understand and experience community. Their comments and stories were gathered through interviews collected towards the end of 2006 and the early part of 2007. These provide richly textured evidence of their need to belong, to maintain everyday relationships and to collaborate with others at the same time as they commodify relationships or share information but not necessarily beliefs and values. Consequences of globalisation such as individualisation, transience in relationships, immediacy in communication, the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, between public and private and the reliance on information and communication technologies are part of their everyday lives. Some study participants feel dis-embedded from their traditional social relationships and seek to establish new ones, whereas others feel comfortable joking with anonymous others. Their intellectualised constructs of community and descriptions of the lived reality of community find reflections in a range of theoretical constructs in the literature, both reinforcing and shifting scholarly understandings of the concept of community.

A Review of Third Sector Research in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: 1990–2016

“…One new direction is being led by young people using mainly on-line action outside normal channels of public scrutiny. Many of "generation x" (Those born roughly between 1963-1980) and especially "generation Y" (Those born between 1981 and 1994) wish to avoid the formal world of organisations all together (Yerbury, 2009). Relations are informal and personal, leading to a construction of unique individual and tribal identity.…”

Information Practices in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Civil Society

“…The idea that we live in an 'information society' (Webster 2006) -one where the growing influence of information and communication technologies has transformed the nature of both economic and social life -is now one which, judging by both mass-media coverage and governmental policy initiatives, is a matter of acceptance rather than debate. The widespread use of the phrase has left it more or less devoid of meaning, but some common threads emerge, including the use of information and communication technologies, multiple understandings of information, the ubiquity of information, the importance of literacy and the significance for progress and a cohesive society of an informed citizenry.…”

“…Since the 1960s, the influence of the work of writers such as Fritz Machlup (1962) and Daniel Bell (1973) has led to the widespread acceptance that the defining feature of contemporary society is the preeminent importance of information for its economic and social functioning. Yet despite this, as Webster (2006) has pointed out, there is surprisingly little consensus among scholars has to how to define the contemporary information society or even what constitutes evidence of its existence.…”

Knowledge and Power of the Civil Society: an empirical study of Brazilian professionals working in the NGOs

“…This, however, does not take place in an unconstrained context (Schommer & Boullosa, 2010, p. 21). Rather, the social approach emphasizes that learning happens within social and cultural structures, where we can see the relational interdependence between subject, world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning and knowledge (Yerbury, 2009). This is influenced by the historical context that is open to changes in a world that is socially constituted day by day (Lave & Wenger, 1991;Haugh 2005;Leana & Pil, 2006;Yerbury, 2013).…”