and/or profile picture that hides their offline identity, but in general Facebook
promotes the idea of appearing as oneself. Depending on the privacy settings each
individual has applied to their Facebook profile, other information from these profiles
that is made publicly available will also be available to group members by clicking
through from the person’s name and profile image. Although some people who meet
through a group may decide to ‘friend’ one another on Facebook, it is also possible that
many will not, and they will therefore effectively remain strangers to one another,
brought together only by their enrolment in a particular unit or course of education.
This raises the question of how well these loosely connected groups operate as
communities, and also how best to understand the learning that might take place within
them.
Education and the value of critical and ethical communities
In “Reconsidering community and the stranger” (2007), Lucas Introna and Martin
Brigham note that the formation of strong communities is most often assumed to
depend upon physical closeness and/or the acceptance or development of “a particular
shared value,” such that a “community can only exist through the inculcation and
assimilation of others into the dominant concerns of the group” (p. 167). Central to this
conception of community is the idea that human communication acts as a bridge
between individuals, whether by enabling the accurate transmission or exchange of
information, supporting persuasive influence over others, creating shared
understandings of the world or promoting group agreement via critical rational debate.
However, some communications scholars, such as John Durham Peters (1999) and
Amit Pinchevski (2005), argue that accepting this idea results in a level of ‘violence’ to
the other. As Pinchevski explains, “[t]raditional communication theories are largely
about the reduction of difference or the transcendence of difference, and consequently,
the elimination of difference” (2005, p. 65).
Although without such a clear focus on ‘violence’ to the other, similar concerns are
presented in Introna and Brigham’s paper, as demonstrated by their use of the words
“inculcation and assimilation,” and later “incorporation and coercion,” to describe the
basis for most popular views of community (2007, p. 167). As an alternative, they
suggest the value of seeing “community as critical and ethical involvement,” an idea that
seems particularly relevant in an educational context where critical engagement and
ethics are valued in both teaching and research (2007, p. 167). Introna and Brigham
explore this possibility by drawing on Levinas’ philosophy of the ethical encounter
between self and other, a philosophy that also forms the basis for Pinchevski’s
exploration of ethical communication.
In contrast with theory that regards communication as a bridge, and communities as
developing around shared values, a phenomenological perspective describes interactions
between people more openly as opportunities to encounter others and their differences
(Craig, 1999). Levinas, for example, describes the self as meeting the other in what he
terms “the face to face,” an encounter which brings them into ‘proximity,’ but also
retains a clear sense of the irreducible ‘distance’ between them (1969, p. 79-81). For
Levinas, the terms proximity and distance do not describe how close interlocutors are to
each other in physical space. Instead, the idea of proximity identifies any situation
allowing the other to reveal a ‘face’ to the self, while the retention of distance is a
reminder that the self can never completely comprehend the other. The Levinasian face
to face, is therefore an encounter during which it is possible for the self to meet, and
potentially to communicate with, the other, while continuing to acknowledge their
absolute alterity. As Roger Silverstone notes, “Levinas’ notion of proximity preserves