As environmental and societal crises increase in numbers, severity, and urgency, online forums for so-called “doomsday preppers” have seen a concomitant surge in membership. Beginning from the perspective of communicative constitution of organization, we explore the sociotechnical communities that emerge on such forums. Methodologically, we use netnographic observations to show that online prepper communities are organizational, in the sense of being networks of communicative episodes that use common narratives to build identities around material objects and physical practices. However, the online prepper communities do not move from the enactment of organization to acting as organizations. This observation leads us to conceptualize online prepper communities as atomizations whose communicative constitution does not entail a capacity for collective action, but only manifests the similarity of disparate individuals. The communicative constitution of atomization, we argue, is symptomatic of an underlying social logic, which promotes individualized responses to collective problems.

中文翻译：

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原子化的交际构成：在线准备者社区和集体行动的危机

随着环境和社会危机的数量、严重性和紧迫性的增加，所谓的“世界末日准备者”在线论坛的成员数量也随之激增。从组织的交际构成的角度出发，我们探讨了出现在此类论坛上的社会技术社区。从方法论上讲，我们使用网络志观察来表明在线准备者社区是有组织的，从某种意义上说，它是交流情节的网络，使用共同的叙述来围绕物质对象和身体实践建立身份。然而，在线准备者社区并没有从组织的制定转变为组织的行为。这一观察使我们将在线准备者社区概念化为原子化，其交流构成并不需要集体行动的能力，而只是体现了不同个体的相似性。我们认为，原子化的交流构成是潜在社会逻辑的症状，它促进对集体问题的个体化反应。