community

[firecat]

What is a community?
How can you tell if you belong to a community?
Are there different ways of belonging to a community?
What communities do you belong to?
Why?

Comments

All IMO, of course

[elynne.livejournal.com]

What is a community?

Any (yes, any) congregation of people who have a common denominator. A half-dozen people stuck in an elevator for an hour is a community, for the duration in which they're stuck in the elevator. A bunch of angry people posting to Slashdot that there is no such thing as an online community are, ironically, a community.

How can you tell if you belong to a community?

1. Satisfying the basic requirements for that particular community (i.e. being in the stuck elevator with other people, being logged into an online forum, living in a particular neighborhood)

2. Maintaining some degree of communication with that community. If you don't talk to your neighbors, you're still living in a community, but you don't belong to it in any useful/realistic sense.

Are there different ways of belonging to a community?

I think that in certain situations, it's possible to belong to a community without the communication thing. Like the person who always comes to parties and just sits in a corner and reads. Hm... though I see that there's some interchange between "communication" and "participation" there that I hadn't thought of before. Perhaps I should change #2 above to "participation" instead of "communication."

What communities do you belong to?

Ummm... currently: my household, my work, my school, the professional organization I've joined, some LJ stuff, some Usenet stuff, some other online stuff, several far-flung groups, several friend-clusters.

Why?

Various different reasons; each community fills a certain need in my life, some more than one.

By the way... hello again. :) I'm sorry I haven't been to AP to see you (and the AP community) in a long while.

Re: All IMO, of course

[firecat]

Hello again! Toldja I'd be back here, just didn't say when, I don't think...

What I find interesting about your definition is that whether you belong to a community is entirely dependent on your participation. If for whatever reason -- you get bored, you get hit by a bus and go into a coma -- you stop participating, then you are no longer part of the community. Therefore, there is no way a community can hold your membership while you're not participating, or seek you out to help you if you aren't participating.

Doesn't seem, therefore, like a community is something you should count on to care about ya.

Re: All IMO, of course

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Well... it may be harsh, but it's true: when a person stops participating in a community, they're no longer a member of that community. That doesn't mean that that community won't feel any sympathy, empathy, obligation, care, or whatever for that person.

Say Debbie is in a sewing club, and Debbie gets hit by a car and goes into a coma. It's perfectly understandable for the community of the sewing club to get together and sew Debbie a get-well present, even though Debbie, by virtue of the fact that she can no longer attend the club, isn't technically a member for the duration. As time goes on, though, unless Debbie was one of the founding members or is otherwise somehow pivotal to the sewing club community, they'll get along without her. How long a community (neighborhood, club, social clique, family, etc.) will stick with you through your inability or unwillingness to communicate/participate in that community is a large measure of how important you are to that community.

I think it's much more interesting to look at how a community helps somebody who has been outside of the community for whatever reason come back. In the case of a person who has left the community voluntarily, I'd say that the burden of reintegration is mostly on that individual's side. In a case like Debbie, though, the worth of the community would show in how smoothly/awkwardly/kindly they welcome her back.

During the time that I haven't been posting to alt.poly, I haven't really been a member of the alt.poly newsgroup community, though I've been in touch with a few in email, a few personally, and many on LJ. But then, I'd say that those things are different communities, which I happen to share with some of the same people that I know through alt.poly.

I suppose I view a community as an extremely flexible, nebulous thing - which goes right along with the idea that any gathering of people who communicate or participate in anything together is a community - whether they like it or not. ;)

The odd thing is, by that definition the people who were rioting in Seattle a couple years back were a de facto community. What a strange idea. I want to chew on that a bit more.

Re: All IMO, of course

[firecat]

[i]I think it's much more interesting to look at how a community helps somebody who has been outside of the community for whatever reason come back.[/i]

Yes, and to me it's interesting why a community would help someone who leaves (voluntarily or not) and then comes back. What feelings get engendered as a result of "sharing a community with someone" that might lead to such help? Would those be feelings of the community, or strictly feelings of individuals within the community?

You mention the people rioting in Seattle -- how does that compare to soldiers who've gone to war together?

Adorable kitty, BTW :)

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmmmm. Thinking about the first set of questions is bringing me to the question of whether there's a difference between individual feelings and "community intentions" when speaking of a community. I keep coming back to alt.poly for examples (gee, I wonder why...): there are many different people with many different communication styles, but there is also, simultaneously, aspects of the - gestalt personality that is made up of the unspoken assumptions of individuals and each individual's response. I'm way to tired to be writing about this stuff coherently.

I also have something to say about rioters vs. soldiers, but I can't think of it right now. I'll come back and work on this more when I've had sleep. :)

Re: Adorable kitty, BTW :)

[firecat]

He was a very cute kitty. [sigh]

Here is what I came up with last night while thinking about this stuff: a community is an entity, and it has its own personality and its own goals and feelings, and also its own memory, and the memory is why the community can sometimes take care of people who have temporarily or recently stopped participating in the community.

I think community personalities/goals/feelings/memories tend to be less complex and shorter-lived than human ones.