Un-defining community
Last week I asked you to answer this question: What is a community? I received some good answers in the comments both here and on Facebook.
By far the most common answer to the question was along the lines of “a group of people with a common interest”. And Wiktionary agrees.
As the idea of online community has grown and developed to the point of being part of the everyday, I worry that our own understanding of community itself is being left behind, lost behind the clutter of buzzwords and interactive online tools.
So, before we go any further, I think it’s important to review a couple of definitions from the experts.
“Online communities are bodies of people joined together by a common interest”. — Jeremiah Owyang, 2007
“Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” — Howard Rheingold, 1993
Yep, these examples are pretty old, but all of these people continue to be leading experts in the field. In fact I tweeted about watching Amy Jo Kim give a keynote speech at Web 2.0 Expo just the other day. If they’ve redefined community since the above, I haven’t seen it (but would love to — let me know in the comments!).
For the most part, these definitions are clear and pragmatic. If only the things they were defining were clear and pragmatic, too. Social media consultant Mack Collier touched on this back in 2006 when he was reading Jake McKee’s definition. At the time he said:
My first thought was, ‘Passion has to be in there somewhere’. In fact, at least for online communities, it seems that passion is literally the backbone of the community.
He’s right. When we think of community, there’s something emotional there beyond a group of people sharing a common interest.
On that thought, a couple of answers to last week’s blog post went deeper, suggesting that there’s a bond between members that differs them from the above definition. One commenter over on Facebook went so far as to say:
unity of the heart with a common thread knitting each other into a beautiful mosaic of dreams and imaginations
But, he makes his point clearer when he says:
When a community tries to inspire people to be a part of their movement, a tug on the heart must be achieved, or else your [sic] just a group trying to get donations.
Fundraising comments aside, there’s a notion there that community can only work when there’s a “tug on the heart”. I think that does get a little closer to that feeling you get when you think of the word community.
But something still isn’t right. We can say “a group of people with common interests, passion and a unity of the heart” but I still don’t really think it’s clear what this thing is that we call community.
Which leads me to Jonathon Hutchinson’s comment (my link and emphasis):
This could be a typical academic response, but perhaps the question to ask is how does the community define itself? I’ve got 1billion answers over at my blog if you’re really interested, but I think it is really important to understand how the community defines itself. In short understanding the boundaries between us and them might be a place to start in understanding “communities” online or not.
I think that Jonathon nails it here. What is messed up with the approach we all take when trying to define something is that we define it from our own perspectives rather than looking at it from its own perspective.
So, let’s take this new approach: What is community when viewed from within? How is it defined?
I have my own thoughts on this but would love to hear what you think first.
Posted from Greg Lexiphanic | Comment »
