Communities
Mercers breakdown of the changing definition of communities over time and their impact on language was very interesting. I hadn't thought of how I would define a community outside of geographical terms let alone how it would change the use of language within it. I can definitely see where Mercer comes from calling musicians a "community of practice" but unless he is using "community" as a metaphor I think he may have been too general with his borrowed terms definition. I think its true that all photocopy machine technicians would have a shared understanding of what the others do regardless of geographic location, but not all would fix the same brand of machine. Some technicians might not know what a "F066" was if they didn't fix Xerox machines. Are some in a Xerox community and other a Toshiba community, or how does it work? I only bring it up because of one point that struck me in the virtual community section, Mercer warning about using the term "virtual community" to loosely. He notes "unless it is more precisely defined, it will be of little value". Mercers comment on the unimportance of good or evil in defining a community I thought was well made. I think CMC will continue to grow and take over as technology continues to make its way into more facets of our lives. Wether for better or worse as a medium I think its the future, as text gives way to speech and now video chat. Its clumsiness that Mercer describes becomes less and less of a problem.
It makes sense to me that if you work solely with one kind of copier and not another there may be separate communities of practice for the different brands. But, if there's significant overlap in the jargon, shared knowledge and other aspects of practice, perhaps they are all one community but with variation. Great question to think about.
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