interactions is. Rituals are concerned more with this routinization than
they are with trying to identify with the same ideas or aesthetic effect.
We can draw from Durkheim the observation that community is as
much about practice as it is about belief, a distinction also recently made
by Nancy Baym (2000) in her innovative analysis of the difference
between ‘audience community and network community’.Audience communities and online communities co-opt mass media for inter-
personal uses. Grappling with the social nature of these new types of com-
munity requires understanding them not just as online communities (organized
through a network) or as audience communities (organized around a text)
but also as communities of practice organized, like all communities, through
habitualized ways of acting. (4)Whilst audience communities might be organized around image, music
and text, both on-line communities andaudience involve regularized
forms of practice.
Drawing on formulations from Hanks (1996) and Lave and Wenger
(1991), the communities-as-practice approach provides an instructive
means of steering our way through the complex differences between
broadcast and network forms of community, and without the sentimen-
talism so often ascribed to the term.At the center of the practice approach is the assumption that a commu-
nity’s structures are instantiated and recreated in habitual and recurrent
ways of acting or practices. When people engage in the ordinar y activities
that constitute their daily lives, they are participating ‘in an activity system
about which participants share understandings concerning what they’re
doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities’ (Lave
and Wenger, 1991, p. 98). In short, if one wants to understand a commu-
nity, then one should look to the ordinar y activities of its participants. This
is a fairly minimalist definition of community, without the warm and fuzzy
connotations that many link to the term, but it is a definition that provides
a workable core. Without shared engagement in a project, there can be no
warmth and fuzziness. (Baym, 2000: 22)Of the different indices of community, place, religion, language and
ethnicity can be associated with communities of belief, whereas it is space
and place which stand out as a site of practice.
As communities of belief become disassociated from particular
places, owing to global movements of culture, modern communication
becomes all the more important in order to sustain them, as they regularly
occur over ever-greater distances.
However, at the same time, such means of communication make pos-
sible new kinds of spaces that are available to be practised. In this connec-
tion, the implications of Michel de Certeau’s formulation that ‘space is
a practiced place’ (de Certeau, 1988: 117) are far-reaching in their176 COMMUNICATION THEORYHolmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 176