Where Is Your Community?

What communities are you a part of?

I’m willing to bet that you don’t even know how many communities you are a part of. As the word community becomes more enshrined in our culture and sprinkled liberally throughout our general conversations, I am worried that we are missing the point of the word. This often happens when a words gets “buzzy.” As its used more it gets transformed.

I’ve been trying to decipher for myself just how many communities I belong to. Even the most superficial skim had my mind reeling realizing that I was basically straddling endless communities; some large, some small, some well organized and some disparate constellations of voices and entities. And it reminded me of high school of all things. As a precocious, often depressed teenager, I constructed maps ( I pompously referred to them as architectonics) in my mind that were basically venn diagrams of all my associations, groups of friends and even cliques that I was not a part of. They were the machinations of a frustrated teenager but that way of looking at things has never fully expired.

Online, Offline and Hybrid Communities

One of the criticisms of social networking that I have always abhorred is the tendency to believe that social networking forces us into online communities at the expense of offline ones, a critique that carries the implication that somehow offline communities are more important, more valuable to society. I was happy to see some push back against this criticism last year. And since 2010 is the year of the community, I can now see in very sharp relief the reality that our online communities do not exist at the expense of our offline ones, but actually in many cases allow us to strengthen and build our offline affiliations.

Personally, I have always seemed to have played the part of a fulcrum or pivot point in the communities that I am a part of, even, counterintuitively, the communities I have originated. It’s an odd position actually. The effect of being a fulcrum in a community is that I can introduce new members to the community often in ways that traditional community members cannot. I can also detect trends and ideas occurring in other spaces that I have a toe in, and introduce them into the current community. It is this kind of abstract thought that is a certain strength of mine. I am proud of it and continually cultivate it, and from the feedback that I receive (and that I constantly solicit) it is helpful.

But there is also a darker downside to playing this fulcrum position. It means that I am never wholly a part of the communities to which I belong. Some might call this Philistinism. I would call it that. And despite the positives mentioned above, the drawbacks are real and I feel them acutely. But I think that as communities develop, through the strength and abilities of social media in particular, we are all going to have to pivot into this fulcrum role. At the very least, change agents, trust agents, force multipliers, whatever term you want to use, people are going to have to develop the skills to play this pivot role more and more.

What Skills Do The New Community Organizers Need?

1. The ability to see what communities you are actually a part of. It wasn’t until I deliberately looked at all my affiliations, all the groups, websites, rss feeds, hashtags, pages, phone and email contacts, IM lists, etc that I realized just how diverse my community participation is. It was like a lotus flowering. To be sure, some were extremely loose and involved nothing more than a few conversations, but I was amazed to find how deep many other were.

2. The ability to reconcile conflicting community members. This is a big one, and for the foreseeable future, a tension that will exist no matter how grand our efforts at reconciliation. But its worth a closer examination. One thing that is a major disruptor of community building efforts is the idea of enemies, and if that word is a tad harsh for you, lets call them “entities diametrically opposed to one another.” How’s that for a euphemism?

Lately, I’ve been watching and listening to “diametrically opposed entites” rip each other to shreds, often over legitimate issues, but too frequently over absolute nonsense. A lot of it revolves around the tension between new and traditional entities. For instance, yesterday, Mediaite published a post on a fracas between Gothamist and the New York Times, all revolving around an honest, decent question from Times Media critic David Carr:

Jake Dobkin, the publisher and co-founder of New York City local news blog Gothamist, will appear on a New York Times panel for executives on Thursday, moderated by Times media critic David Carr. A New York native, Dobkin attended both New York University and Columbia, and his site covers the metro area with the fervency of devoted locals and the help of a dedicated team of editors, in addition to a tip-happy reader base and loyal commentariat….

Dobkin wastes no time, erupting right away: “I don’t think a paper that loses millions of dollars a year and funds itself by taking extortionary loans from plutocratic Mexican billionaires can be said to be competing in anything, Metro or otherwise.” From there, Dobkin calls out any media organization “that supports itself by sucking on the teat of some old rich guy (or his heirs!)” and spills his own e-ideology.

Mediaite goes on to talk about how even though Dobkin makes some good points, its basically the exact wrong way to engage someone who has come to you looking for honest and open engagement. Especially someone like Carr, who from all accounts, is someone who “gets it.” Now Dobkin certainly has some good claims, many that I agree with. The Times has failed to really grab hold of the audience that Gothamist has. But from my view, these two are important members of the same community, even though they are diametrically opposed to one another. Does Dobkin wake up and envision his community as the same one that David Carr exists in? I hope so, because he does.

Here is the crux of the problem with building communities, often when the strongest members of those communities distrust each other. How many restaurateurs hate the thought of food bloggers? How many galleries and art collectors sneer at the very mention of art blogs?

But one way or another, true community builders have got to start the reconciliation process. And of course it all begins with mutual respect despite disagreements. A restaurateur who has been savaged by a particular food blogger, who thinks that person has no idea what they are talking about and wishes that the whole phenomenon would just go away, needs to come around to the fact that that food blogger is an important member of the FOOD community. That they are motivated by very much the same things as that restaurateur, in this case their love and admiration for culinary culture. Same could be said for art bloggers, fashion, products, real estate etc.

When will the healing begin?

The healing will begin when we all start to think about the communities of which we are a part. Maybe starting by making a map of our communities, as I used to do all those awkard years ago, is not the worst place to start

Image Source: MITO SettembreMusica

Tagged as: Community Building, Imperfection is Authentic