Community
Rosemary Avance
The digital era poses new possibilities and challenges to our understanding of the nature and constitution of community, long a highly moralized and politicized keyword in the field of communication and elsewhere. Its historic uses range from a general denotation of social organization, district, or state; to the holding of important things in common; to the existential togetherness and unity found in moments of communitas. Our English-language community originates from the Latin root communis, “common, public, general, shared by all or many,” which evolved into the fourteenth-century Old French comunité meaning “commonness, everybody.” Originally the noun was affective, referencing a quality of fellowship, before it ever referred to an aggregation of bodies or souls. Traditionally the term has encompassed our neighborhoods, religious centers, and nation-states—historically, geographic and temporal birthrights, subjectivities unchosen by the individual. Today, we speak of a global community, made possible by communication technologies, and our geographically specific notions of community are disrupted by the possibilities of the digital, where physically distant, disembodied beings create what they also call community. But are the features and affordances of digital community distinct from those we associate with embodied clanship and kinship?
Philosophers and social scientists have long placed community at the apex of human association as a utopian model of connection and cohesion, a place where human wills unite for the good of the group. In Western thought, premodern notions of community are linked with singleness of reason (as in Socrates’s philosophical tradition) and with singleness of purpose (as in Christian theological traditions). Early sociologists continued the tradition; in 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies1 identified Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, roughly “community” and “society,” as two ways of organizing social ties. Tönnies conceived of the community as a traditional structure wherein skills and trades, agrarian lifestyles, and ethnic and religious ties united individuals with what Durkheim called a collective consciousness, where the contents of an individual’s consciousness were largely held in common with the group.2 For Durkheim, modernity’s best hope rests in a reclaiming of the collective consciousness, which is threatened by the division of labor and the rise of the individual.
In postmodernity, the very concept of community is rife with sacred implications, redeeming the isolated individual from a society in which “forms of life are dislocated, roots unsettled, traditions undone . . . at sea in a world where common meanings have lost their force.”3 Victor Turner4 adopts the source of the word in his theories of liminality and communitas, arguing after van Gennep that ritual rites of passage move an individual from a state of social indeterminacy to a state of communal oneness and homogeneity. The outcome of a liminal individual’s reincorporation into a group is a burdening, as the individual takes on obligation and responsibility toward defined others. This is the formation, the very root, of community—an ethical orientation outside oneself and toward others. The implication of community, then, is citizenship-belonging. Community results when individuals accept and serve their obligations and responsibilities vis-à-vis the collective—a normative model exported to the West and yet built on fieldwork done in a traditional Ndembu village.5
Thus privileging a traditional community model formed around family, clan, or tribal affiliations, this Western obsession springs from a postmodern malaise around community’s purported demise in an industrialized and urbanized landscape.6 Paradoxically, modern mass communication technologies have long played a leading role in the struggle to regain a semblance of premodern, pretechnological community. John Dewey argued in 1927 that journalism could reproduce the effects of traditional communities, uniting a public into a community—a collective of individuals who emerge in consequence of their relation one to the other.7 Importantly, Dewey’s concern—like concerns about digital communication today—centered on a lack of face-to-face communication in industrialized life and proposed a mediated cure. He believed mass communication could reinstate consensus in social life. Likewise, Robert Park, working with the Chicago School of sociologists, argued that despite the dangers of consumerism, party politics, and petty gossip (prescient technological concerns, these), the role of the newspaper was to “reproduce, as far as possible, in the city the conditions of life in the village.”8
Nearly a century later, we continue to place our hopes in mediation technologies to regain some imagined pure past, but with an ambivalence that permeates our understanding of what technology is and what it can do. As media theorist Felicia Wu Song has noted, “To study virtual communities is to delve into questions about our cultural beliefs about technology.”9 Despite our grand hopes, moral panics accompany all new media technologies, and the pronounced fear associated with global connectivity via the internet, with no little irony, reflects a long-standing fear of disconnection. Even before internet saturation, Robert Putnam notoriously gave voice to this fear in Bowling Alone,10 suggesting that declines in community commitment manifest in low civic and political engagement, declining religious participation, increasing distrust, decreasing social ties, and waning altruism are at least in part attributable to technology and mass media, as entertainment and news are tailored to the individual and consumed alone. Putnam paints a bleak image of Americans in dark houses, television lights flickering and TV dinners mindlessly consumed. It is the dark side of liberal individualism, our modern anomie.
Digital community seems to offer a panacea to the fear of disconnection in a new media age. Framed as a solution to the problem of modernity, disembodied cyberspace somehow at once flattens and broadens our notions of self. Still, “digital community” is an elusive concept to pin down with precision. Some scholars differentiate between “virtual” and “digital” communities, the former denoting a quasi-geographical location (e.g., a virtual gaming community located at a particular URL), whereas digital communities are ephemeral, united around a shared interest or identity rather than a particular virtual location. But distinctions between “virtual” and “digital” communities remain fuzzy across disciplines, so that a reference to “online community” works as an imprecise but useful stand-in to refer to myriad forms of “relatively stable, long-term online group associations mediated by the internet or a similar network.”11 Various taxonomic models of online communities have been put forth, dividing them based on attributes, support software, relationship to the offline sphere, and boundlessness,12 or based on community types such as interest, relationship, fantasy, and transaction.13
While past conceptions of community were generally outside one’s agential selection—you are born and die in your town; your religion is the faith of your parents—today’s diverse digital landscape means self-selection into communities of interest and affinity. But digital communities do not entirely escape the deterministic, as availability still marks a very real digital divide between those with access to the technology and those without. Not only that, but the affordances of various platforms, both in intended and possible uses, all inform what might be seen as a digital community’s blueprint. Online community formation relies on this user-centered software architecture that predates the community itself, so that communities evolve and adapt not in spite of but because of the affordances of their technological platform. These include format, space constraints, visuals, fixity vs. mutability, privacy vs. surveillance, peer feedback, report features/terms of service, modality (cellular, tablet, desktop)—all features that inform what is possible in a given community. Digital communities can evade some but not all of the fixity of these structural constraints, reaching across a variety of platforms and forums on both the light and the dark web.
Many social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are primarily “intentional communities” wherein self-selection into the platform and mutual “friending” secure one’s place.14 Other venues, like Twitter and blogs, involve asymmetric relationships, wherein one user may be “followed” without following back; these platforms may not in and of themselves be communities, but they can provide “the basis of interlinked personal communities” measured by membership, influence, integration/need fulfillment, and shared emotional connection.15 Highly fragmented, niche communities redistribute power in both intangible and tangible ways—think only of the economic impact of peer-to-peer communities on the music industry, where file sharing challenges traditional conceptions of property rights and even our collective moral code.16 Indeed, content sharing is the basis of online community—from photos, to text, to files and links—and users themselves decide their own level of engagement in these participatory cultures. Within the communities themselves, the flattening dynamic of internet culture, where everyone17 can have a platform and a voice, obfuscates the very real social hierarchies that are supported by social processes and norms—all of which evolve from platform affordances.
Because the notion of community has been imbued with ethical and moral implications, claims that community can exist online are met with doubt, debate, and sometimes derision. Some scholars and observers express a reluctance to accept Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or forums as true examples of community, seeing these spaces as primarily narcissistic expressions of what Manuel Castells calls the “culture of individualism,” emphasizing consumerism, networked individualism, and autonomy; rather than the “culture of communalism,” rooted in history and geography.18 Critical observers also rightly note that what is often called “community” online is in fact a consumer identity, created by marketers and sutured to users’ understandings of their own behaviors.19
To be sure, not every site that calls itself a community is one—just as not every site that does not, is not. There are also functions and uses of cyberspace that do not involve or invoke community. Community, online as offline, is also a mixed bag: not all associations are good ones, and not all communities are effective for all users at all times. Yet some users, if we take them at their word, say that online community provides a space to be “real”—or somehow more authentic—in ways that offline, embodied community might sanction. An overabundance of narrative visibility and social support on the internet allows some users to foster difference in ways that limited offline social networks simply cannot sustain. That is to say, in today’s world it is not uncommon for youth to self-identify as queer and first “come out” in digital spaces20 or, to draw on my own ethnographic work, for Mormons to foster heterodox (e.g., liberal) identities in closed Facebook groups before what they too mark as a “coming out” to their conservative “real-world” family and friends.21
Lawrence Lessig has noted: “Cyberspace is a place. People live there. They experience all the sorts of things that they experience in real space, there. For some, they experience more. They experience this not as isolated individuals, playing some high tech computer game; they experience it in groups, in communities, among strangers, among people they come to know, and sometimes like.”22 When the placeness and spaceness of cyberspace become givens among scholars and observers, perhaps then the veracity of online community—as a possibility, and sometimes a reality—will be accepted by moralists and skeptics. We might do well to remember the origin of our term community, which referenced a quality of fellowship before it ever referred to an aggregation of souls. It seems our term has come full circle, as disembodied souls unite in fellowship mediated by the digital.
See in this volume: culture, event, forum, gaming, memory, sharing
See in Williams: city, class, collective, communication, communism, community, culture, ecology, ethnic, exploitation, individual, institution, mechanical, nationalist, native, organic, popular, society, technology, tradition
Notes
1Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association [Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft], trans. C. P. Loomis (London: Routledge, 1955).
2Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society(1893) (New York: Free Press, 2014).
3Michael J. Sandel, “Morality and the Liberal Idea,” New Republic 190(9) (May 7, 1984): 17.
4Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine, 1969), 94–130.
5It should be noted that the valorization of the concept of community, while still normative, has not gone entirely unchecked. Structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Benedict Anderson point out that the idealization of community as the ultimate social formation imbues it with a dangerous power. Foucault reminds us that pure community is at base an apparatus of control over social relations and interactions. Anderson reaffirms, too, the imaginary nature of community, which we conceive of as a “deep, horizontal comradeship” in such a way that power differentials are jointly pretended away.
6Indeed, the discipline of sociology was established as a response to the perception of community’s disintegration owing to industrialization and urbanization.
7John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1927).
8Robert E. Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” American Journal of Sociology 29(3) (1923): 277.
9Felicia W. Song, Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Together Online (New York: Lang, 2009), 3.
10Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
11Andrew Feenberg and Darin David Barney, Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
12Jonathan Lazar and Jennifer Preece, “Classification Schema for Online Communities,” Proceedings of the 1998 Association for Information Systems Conference (1998), 84–86.
13John Hagel and Arthur G. Armstrong, Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
14Cf. danah boyd, “Friends, Friendsters, and Myspace Top 8: Writing Community into Being on Social Network Sites,” First Monday 11(12) (December 4, 2006). Available at http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1418/1336.
15Gruzd Anatoliy, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev, “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” American Behavioral Scientist 55(10) (2011): 1294.
16See Jerald Hughes and Karl Reiner Lang, “If I Had a Song: The Culture of Digital Community Networks and Its Impact on the Music Industry,” International Journal on Media Management 5(3) (2003): 180–89.
17 “Everyone,” that is, with access, equipment, technological savvy, and, presumably, an audience.
18Manuel Castells, “Communication, Power, and Counter-power in the Network Society,” International Journal of Communication 1 (2007): 238–66.
19Cf. Robert V. Kozinets, “E-tribalized Marketing? The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption,” European Management Journal 17(3) (1999): 252–64.
20Mary L. Gray, “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires: Coming Out Online and the Remediation of the Coming-Out Story,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14(4) (July 2009): 1162–89.
21Here I’m drawing on years of ethnographic work among Mormons on the internet, with details forthcoming in my dissertation, “Constructing Religion in the Digital Age: The Internet and Modern Mormon Identities”; for more on Mormon deconversion and online narratives, see Rosemary Avance, “Seeing the Light: Mormon Conversion and Deconversion Narratives in Off- and Online Worlds,” Journal of Media and Religion 12(1) (2013): 16–24.
22Lawrence Lessig, “The Zones of Cyberspace,” Stanford Law Review 48(5) (May 1996): 1403.