My blog is supposed to focus on identity but I intend writing about community here. Who makes the rules about what I write – I do. Besides I will end up talking about identity anyway so there’s enough justification – huh ?
Community and online communities – what’s the difference? They are similar in many ways. Both have a factor of participation – you participate in a community and are then part of it or you don’t and are outside it. You have an identity (told you so) in both . People have a perception of you both as an online participant and as a real person within your local community. Both provide the opportunity to participate in different communities (e.g. I am a member of my local street community, of the game hunting community and the counselling community. Online I am a member of the Runescape Gaming community, the SecondLife Virtual community and the Facebook social network community).
A paper I have been reading (no I am not going to go look it up right now) is suggesting that the Internet is bringing about a revolution in our society, a revolution in the truest sense of the word. That it may lead to changes that cannot yet be foreseen. The primary reason for this is because the Internet increases our accessibility to each other and accessibility is a key factor on building communities. Before the industrial revolution communities were small and isolated due to lack of communications media and rapid transport. Your community was the village you lived in – period. Then the industrial age arrived and suddenly it was possible to travel and communicate over large distances. Suddenly accessibility went up by a large factor. Now it was possible to work outside the village. Possible to trade outside the village, town, city and country. The telephone provided the first enormous jump in communication accessibility. However, there were still real physical limits for most people on how many people they could actually interact with on a regular basis.
The Internet has changed all that. It is now possible to regularly communicate via email, text, voice and video with anyone in the world that you can find using the search engines being implemented in online communities. It is well known that the industrial revolution changed the way we live in ways we could not imagine at the time. The Internet promises further uncharted changes in our society, possibly more radical than we experienced during the industrial upheaval. There are undoubtedly ways the Internet can be used for the benefit of all people on the planet and of course just as many ways in which it can be used in negative harmful ways. The corporate power elites and their political arms were slow to awaken to the potential of the Internet but now they are aware and trying to control it as we are seeing in the US and other western countries. Being a distributed environment under no one entities control, they have not yet succeeded in wresting power from the people. We should be mindful of this incredible gift that gives us all a voice and the freedom to connect and unite in ever increasingly different ways. See http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0r71L7cojE for Bill Moyers on protecting our freedoms.
Copyright Protoruru 2008!
I seem to have spent the weekend defending online communities ( I much prefer the word online to virtual which implies a sense of unreality)
Some people that I speak with continue to view online communities as second rate and the home of the socially inept, the lonely and tragic.
I don’t believe this.
I concur that we make meaning and community wherever we can and it is community that is nurturing and fulfilling in whatever guise it takes.
For example…An AA meeting.
While many will say that it is the spiritual conversion that supports people to abstinence, I would hypothesise that it is the “Group of Drunks” that is a bigger catalyst.
Interesting thing about power that I would like to mention.
I have been playing mobwars on facebook and it’s interesting how quickly I have become invested in it. I feel really involved with my character and was really annoyed that some one cane and beat me up when I wasn’t looking! Annoyed to the point of going back and punching him in the face when he was in hospital!
Not a normal action for me…but it relates to a desire to retaliate when hurt. I hadn’t realised how quickly these feelings can be triggered.
(As for second life…I finally managed to work out how to move around, thanks to a very friendly kiwi mentor…she was even wearing an all black shirt! small online world, eh)
Thanks for the comment Prickly. Sounds like you experienced a dose of disinhibition effect with the mobwars experience. I kinda find it hard to believe that you’d do that IRL !! (;-)
I’d agree that I’d side with the mutual connection with others in group therapy that is the added real ingredient that makes the difference rather than the idea of “spiritual conversion”. I have a lot of trouble with the belief that dependence on an external entity of faith (God) is a healthy alternative to developing a connection with one’s own inner nurturing self (after dealing with an unhelpful introjects from past experience). The support from others must also be helpful in maintaining abstinence.
Can we separate identity from community? They are intermeshed dynamics surely
It is a revolution and there are counter-waves of stability and resistance also.
Identity and community are intermeshed – hmmm …. neat observation (;-)
A bit like that Zen saying “does the tree falling in the forest make a sound if there is no-one there to hear it?” – can we have an identity without a community to know us?