Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Resistance is fertile: Toward a definition of community

Occasionally, the associations of a particular word become more powerful than its meaning. For me and many others studying social media, the word community is just such an example. In general, the word community is a sociological term; it is used in reference to the study and classification of human socities. The term dates back to the 14th century from the Old French communité, from the Latin communitatem/communitas meaning "fellowship" and a "community of relations or feelings," which is also directly connected to the term communis, meaning "common, public, general, shared by all or many" (see common).

It's a large, umbrella-like term that can range in scale from groups of people to groups of nations. It can refer to a society at large, a common character (as in a community of interest), and as a social activity (see community of practice). Groups sizes and participation within communities ranges from small to large, with many large communities being sustained by the efforts of a small groups residing within in them. Again, this simple illustration points to the complexity inherent in the term.

What threads together the wide range of definitions of community is the notion of likeness, a shared commonality, a tie that binds people or groups of people together.

In her article Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project, Anita Blanchard cites a definition of virtual community that seeks to differentiate a virtual community from a virtual settlements from a sense of community (Blanchard, 2004). Several of Blanchard's sources for the definition of a virtual community try to affix them with the same characteristics as concrete ones, ignoring the affordances of social software (which, to be fair, was still in early stages of development when they were probably conducting their research in the mid-to-late 1990s).

With the ridiculously easy group forming capabilities ushered in by the Read/Write Web, the use of the term community has spread even wider and farther. The term is used so broadly that it sometimes feels like it can apply to practically any group or grouping of people. But that's not quite right either. For example, Shirky (2008) notes, "an audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack" (p.85). On the Web, however, the elasticity of our handy term is once again put to test.

Now here's where things get a bit dicy. Shirky (2008) points out that Read/Write tools provide a platform that makes every webpage a "latent community" (p 102). He elaborates:

"Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf  of time, and so on" (p. 102).

This is quite a peculiar, yet equally intriguing notion of community. Each webpage serves as a virtual space that can potentially unite people by serving a common interest. In essence, the Read/Write Web provides a new space for people to settle, commune, share, and cooperate.

What this suggests is that more people now have the ability to communicate and tie into to one another than ever before. We are witnessing the restructuring of organizational structures and the management of information on a scale never before heard of. As Shirky (2008) again points out,"any radical change in our ability to communicate with one another changes society" (p. 106). But here's the part that Shirky adds that also allows us to see things differently:

"Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring" (p. 105).

In other words, it's not the invention of the tool that holds value; it's the tool's ubiquitousness that contains the value which ultimately leads to profound social changes.

Similarly, the tools that support virtual communities probably won't be very interesting until they become invisible, everyday components in our lives. For some, this is already the case and as such we are beginning to see new and powerful means to share, commune, and identify with one another. For example, I have found a simple tool like Twitter has allowed to both collapse and expand my professional and personal networks whether I am at work, on a plane, at my desk, or on the beach. Such a powerful little application that limits my choices but by doing so allows me a tremendous amount of freedom to connect, share, and cooperate within its boundaries.

So while I pretended to desire a limited use of the term community, in reality, I like the fact that the term resists fixity. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, when a language becomes fixed, the human intellect also becomes fixed. While there are degrees of fixedness in language which allows us to function in a state of seeming normalcy, the dividing line between elasticity and fixity in a language is never usually easy to determine. Likewise, the need to limit our current definition of virtual community could potentially limit its potential range of meaning and applicability.

For the most part, it is fair to say communities exist in some form or another across societies, and that they all share such similarities as membership, boundaries, norms, forms of exchange, and often shared emotional connections (Blanchard, 2004). With the introduction of social media, the term community now equals a mix of social and technological factors that should continue to evolve and adapt over time.


References:

Blanchard, A. (2004). Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved 28 April 2008 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.