What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?

Welcoming, validating, supportive, sanitizing. A transcendental signifier for the digital age! But as you point out, many of us hear a hint of oppression in the term. In my current career (advertising), the term disguises our invitiation to interpellation and active participation in our data collection. In my past (academia), it was often used to validate subject positons and forms of interpretation, against others. After all, communities are always defined as much by what they exclude. In Utopia, everone is never invited to the party. But block parties are often more fun than you expect. Smart, insightful, consise, useful. Thank you

Fragmentation, illusion and impotence are the realities of contemporary life. Participatory natural groupings do not emerge in the age of 'click' and disappear. We live in even more illusory 'fake' groups that within nanoseconds vanish, forgotten never to be resurrected. We do not see, hear, feel, touch, embrace, kiss become aroused or hate and despise a person but only an illusion so evanescent that it becomes a shade, a flittering, glimmering nanosecond...fraudulent in its significance. There is no community that is substantial with shared passions and objectives. We are slipping into 'fake' and 'gone'.

Powerful...& not merely about Facebook...I’m feeling as though there are no longer legitimate communities of democratic power. We are all being “sold” something...& power is transferred when we buy.

In digital marketing & strategy the term is “user” - with all the drug addict implications.

Just leave the so-called community, then, and find a real one. It is easy to quit Facebook. It feels great.

Digital communities give you the ultimate power rarely granted in physical communities. You can simply not log on. If you play in someone else’s sandbox, you play their rules. Just go find another sandbox. We do not seem to have a shortage of them.

In other words, the new kind of "community," in which individuals serve the needs of corporations (and the politicians they own), is supplanting the "legacy" communities that serve the needs of the individuals who comprise it. It's "Shareholder Value Capitalism" at work, inexorably reducing everyone and everything to mere commodities that corporate executives can plunder to create short-term gain for themselves and shareholders.

Such a pleasure to wake up late on a Saturday morning, scroll through my Tumblr communities, sit next to my husband looking at at his Facebook communities, then read this brilliant, beautifully written column and comment along with the New York Times community. Only connect.

A brilliant thought provoking piece. Thank you.

I am such a fan of this wonderful writer that even if one doesn't formally exist, I consider myself to be a member of the Chocano community.

interesting - thought-provoking - from communite - joint ownership ? I grew up going to church 3-4 times a week - from that I formed the view that attendees were people who wanted to belong - to a community - and wanted to feel part of something - and were typically happy to regard outsiders as evil. The hypocrisy came when we were admonished to go out and 'witness to' (convert) non-believers - yet I was raised to regard them as the devil and to be avoided at all costs. So you can guess how many people I encouraged to join the church. “Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth, and you should save it for someone you love.” - Butch Hancock

An interesting piece which confirms my intuition of never having a Fakebook account. I am being dishonest, I had one Fakebook account for 2 months which I regretted and deleted it when it was still possible. These online communities are not any different from folks like me who make comments to NYT, WSJ and the Post stories. I find these comments sections also represent a set of communities unique to each newspaper. The Washington Post comment community seems to only care about how you write English and not what you write. I have been taken to task more in the Post of not being proficient in English by folks who do not do spell check. The WSJ comment community for the most part rarely comments on styles but they do take umbrage if there is a significant deviation from Republican orthodoxy. And mind you, I am a Republican. In the NYT comment community - because the Times approves what is commented - there appears to be little give and take and not a very active community. So there, you have 3 communities that I belong to courtsey of stories like this and others. I enjoy them for their own rules and foibles.

Carina deconstructs that wonderful word “community,” and discusses how it has been misused. It is arguably worse when it is a near-holy word for a group of people, who often cite it as one of its high values, but then can fail to live up to it. This is what is happening in my sustainability world and this is addressed primarily to them. While no worse at it, in my experience we’re only marginally better than average. And that isn’t good enough. We don’t seem to acknowledge our special responsibility to treat people well. We (a) don’t always return emails, phone calls, letters or get back to people when we say we will; (b) sometimes treat adjunct professors as disposable; (c) don’t always look out for each other; (d) can have related stakeholder input sessions which are pro forma or quickly reject bold ideas; (e) feud when we’re supposed to be practicing another similar term, cooperation; (f) might actually practice it, but limit it to a defined small geographic space, like a town, and not to the rest of the world. It’s not that we always fall short, and perhaps it is only human when we do. But if we can’t seek to lead in modeling community, and are not prepared to reflect, we should stop using the term. If necessary, with the dominant “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t really exist” mindset in our field, then seek to operationalize it in meaningful ways and run the numbers. Then we’ll be ready to talk about the importance of community in pursuing a sustainable society.

1) David McMillan and David Chavis, the two psychologists cited by Ms Chocano in this piece, emphasize the importance of group bonds in meeting their members' social needs; as per the sociologist Abraham Maslow, for example, in his pyramid of human needs. 2) David Brooks, a domestic affairs columnist for the NY Times, today (Apr. 17, 2018) too, discusses Facebook users and their need for a "relational" community, in his column. He opens his column with a discussion of how a rancher was about to lose the family ranch via an "act of God"; but, a rival intervenes and cosigns a note to tide the surviving family through this rough patch, because of the deceased's integrity. Mr Brooks too argues that: "People try to compensate for the lack of intimate connection by placing their moral and emotional longings on their political, ethnic, and other tribes, turning them viciously on each other." 3) Ms Chocano concludes her essay by noting that social media are privately held with the members themselves possessing little, with the result that there is "one winner and a community of losers." Mr Brooks attributes the unrealizable expectations of many social media users, noted above, to their endemic social neediness. 4) And, a powerful current "law of nature" feeding both of these arguments are the growing disparities in the US income and wealth distributions. [JJL Tu 04/17/2018 1:33 pm Greenville NC]