Fraternal Community

For this assignment I chose to examine a community that exists almost exclusively offline, but in recent years has extended its network to include online interactions. My fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE), has been around for almost 140 years here at Cornell. As a result, the vast majority of interacting in this social network occurs FtF as opposed to through CMC channels. However, the recent creation of a house list serve has enabled brothers, no matter where they may be so long as they have internet access, to stay current on house-related news and events through email.

The fraternity definitely falls in line with the idea of “Gemeinschaft (community)” proposed by Tonnies in 1887. The brothers forge strong interpersonal ties with each other primarily through FtF bonding that occurs during the pledging process, social events, working on house improvements, and many other instances that arise when you are living and spending time with other people. We develop the “shared focus and common purpose, language and identity” that Haythornthwaite (2007) discusses in her chapter on social networks. Although these shared values and attitudes are generally what draw us to the same fraternity in the first place, the pledging process takes it to a whole new level with the conformity we are expected to develop. Geographic co-location is another important factor as we are brought even closer than simply living on the same campus by now living under the same roof.

Looking at the fraternity through the social network perspective helps to uncover more ways that it provides a strong, tight-knit community. The only way for any of us to complete pledging and successfully become a brother is to exchange information and ideas, share our knowledge, and provide social/emotional support all in an effort to reach our common goals. We must learn to not only trust ourselves and our fellow pledges, but to also trust the brothers and the house as a whole which is something that alumni say is not lost even forty years later. Our social network relies on the bonds (ties) between the brothers (the actors) who support each other with advice and camaraderie through our friendships (relations). It is expected of each brother to provide assistance to someone who needs it (as we all received help from brothers at some point ourselves) and those who do not offer such help are pushed to the “outskirts” of the community by violating this norm of reciprocity.

The main area where we see the benefit of an offline/online synergy in our fraternity is when there is a lack of physical proximity. This can be as minimal as notifying a brother, who is not living in the house but is in Ithaca, via email that he needs to come by on Sunday to help with a house clean-up. Or it can be as significant as coordinating a funeral ceremony for our highly devoted alumni chairman with brothers still in the house to those in retirement homes, and some even living on different continents. In the context of this social network the community is clearly based offline but the features of online communication serve to preserve the strong bonds in our community when offline just is not enough.

Here is the link to our chapter's website which is maintained by our alumni