The Scattered Members of an Invisible Republic: Virtual Communities and Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics

Poststructuralism and information studies

“…It also problematizes more traditional understandings of self and mental models that are evident in information studies' cognitive approach and user studies approaches that define the user as an autonomous individual (Touminen, 1997). Last, we can see in Cronin (1995) and Paling (20021, as well as Gary Burnett's (2002) work, discussed earlier, that complex entities such as "texts" and even "authors" are composed of semantic excesses, synchronic differences, and historical multiplicities. Poststructural and emergent models for various types of notions of identity (for example, users, vocabulary structures, documents) are useful to information studies in that they show persons, information, and knowledge as not simply relational and temporal, but dynamically so.…”

“…To be fair, G. Burnett (2002) does not fully develop Ricoeur's (1991) argument in this direction, writing within the more traditional constraints of notions of authorial intention, public texts, and readerly reintegration, seeing textual production as mimicking physically present interlocutions. The problem remains, however, as Saussure (19661, Heidegger (for example 1971, p. 111-136), and Benjamin (1978, p. 314-332) argued, that language exists before the speaker (or writer) uses it, and that, as Derrida (1976Derrida ( , 1982 has argued, physical presence cannot act as a guarantor, or even as a primary model, for the notion of intention or even of meaning in writing or in language as a whole.…”

“…Gary Burnett (2002) has developed from an examination of Paul Ricoeur's (e.g., 1991) work a very important argument that integrates, but also suggests, something more than a simple hermeneutic perspective for information studies. Burnett argues that virtual online communities make visible both the mutually dependent manner of writing and reading in textual production and how dissonance within texts leads to a generative power in the production of further textual materials.…”

An exploration of emotional intelligence in virtual teams

“…Boland (1991) was the first to advocate the use of hermeneutics in the field of Information Systems research. Hermeneutic techniques have been employed in characterizing virtual communities (Burnett, 2002;Burnett, Dickey, Kazmer & Chudoba, 2003), in studying the role of communication norms in virtual teams (Ghosh, Yates & Orlikowski, 2004), and the information system development process (Boland & Day, 1989).…”

“…The philosophy of hermeneutics, or interpretation of text, is primarily concerned with the process of creating meaning from texts (Boland, 1991). Burnett (2002) notes that the process of creating meaning is an interpretive act performed by individual consumers of a text and therefore, numerous meanings may be derived from a single text. It has been suggested that the meaning extracted from a message does not belong to the message author (Boland, 1996).…”