community
fragment a: defining community
Community is an interesting word, because no definition of the
world tends to define it on the whole. One of my favorites
belongs to the San
Francisco Estuary Institute: "[t]he
organisms inhabiting a common environment and interacting with
one another". I like it because it seems broad and fairly
inclusive, but put it in a digital context. Online, we're
compelled to redefine words like "inhabit" and "interact" in order
to express the environment. Online, interaction requires
a device and we only inhabit the adjacent space. We join
an online community to be with like-minded people yet our self-representation
is not necessarily accurate and may not even be capable of significant
verisimilitude. The idea of an "online community" is somewhat
contrary and fragmented. It is best defined as a separate
term, exclusively its own, from the definitions surrounding its
physical homonym.
Barry Wellman coins the term "networked individualism", which
Barney describes as "sociability based on highly dynamic, spatially
dislocated, nested networks of social ties constructed through
individual choice and interests and maintained by communication" (Barney
37). I feel this is fairly accurate. I feel the subtle
difference is, when ignoring space and time (or timelessness, as
the case may be), a physical community forms a whole whereas a
virtual community remains individualized. In a virtual community,
people come together, but at any given point in that interaction,
each and every person remains as a representation of him or herself. |
