What is it and how can we obtain it?
These questions stayed with me after class this week because many of us were probably speaking from our own view of what community means. I therefore decided to do a bit of research on the term community and found an interesting mix of ideas.
The American Heritage Dictionary online defines community as:
1. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.
2. A group of people having common interests
The encyclopedia of informal education had a lot more to say on the topic of community, exploring it in three different ways: place, interests and communion. The site is well developed with both historical accounts and theoretical support on what community means to our world. An excerpt I found to be interesting follows:
“The fact that people live close to one another does not necessarily mean that they have much to do with each other. There may be little interaction between neighbours. It is the nature of the relationships between people and the social networks of which they are a part that is often seen as one of the more significant aspects of ‘community.”
David Morley’s discussion of residential segregation, boundaries and mobility draws on this quote and deals with the misconception of community as indicative of space and time. The same argument goes for online communities. Although on Facebook we have a sense of community, even within this, there may be a lack of place, interest and communion. Additionally, I think we can all agree that about half of the people listed as our “friends” are really not a part of our day-to-day community. Just like many of the people who live beside us are people we only know by name so too are the faces we see on Facebook each day.
To better situate my ideas I want to turn to Darin Barney’s article, “The Vanishing Table, or Community in a World that is No World”. In his argument concerning the relationship of community, commodities and digital media Barney states that ”community is impoverished, not necessarily eliminated, by technologically-sponsored wordlessness and that digital media participates in this sponsorship” (63). The word impoverished I find quite fitting. I think we need to ask ourselves: Are the communities, the spaces of belonging, which we create a part of the destruction of life and society that we see around us? I can see that within online social networks such as Facebook, community is possible. Although it seems as if our definition of community is simply a definition of numbers and face time on an online forum. As critical as these statements may sound, I think they are important for us to think about. I want to believe that technology can create a community that rests on pillars of place, interests and communion. However I feel that we often misuse these forums for other purposes such as popularity contests and surveillance, both of which lead to an impoverishment of community.
Thank you sophie for providing us with many instrumental definitions of "community". However, I still feel uncertain to say how to define the word "same".
ReplyDeleteAlso, I also find the word "impoverishment" very interesting. I always believe that when we gain something, we lose something. Technology has empowered us to overcome the limits of time and space, but at the same time made the mediated communication unreal and superficial. But on the whole, I think technologies (e.g. television and facebook) create more possibilities for the construction of community among global citizens, because otherwise they will have no way to connect with each other.
Stella, I agree with your comment about the Internet's ability to link people from across the globe, however I feel as if it has also made us lose touch with those in the same city as us. Some would argue that we have gotten closer through media, but at the same time, I think our definition of relationship, like your term of 'same', has also changed and deserves to be re-examined.
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