As I am wont to do, I’ve been thinking about community. Perhaps it’s traveling as a tech consultant that has me on a plane and hotel as much as anything – which can (pardon the pun) drive home the sense of rootlessness, of pondering what home is like, and where ones people or community lives. Being a Canadian living in the U.S. has long gotten me thinking about what it means to be an outsider or how one assimilates and becomes part of a community. Thinking about community has been a big part of my consciousness for years – largely drifting in and out of different communities I’m a part of as a designer, consultant, Canadian, woman in tech, INFJer and any other label that fits me for today. I thought about sharing a link about Toronto Batman my friends on Facebook highlighting the parts of found particularly T-Dot like – The tokens! The cop taking a picture! Shots of the Eaton Center! The cynical staff at that FutureShop downtown! Then I started to wonder, does it seem funny to me because I’m away from one of my communities, and would it seem as funny to the other folks I know on Facebook who didn’t grow up in Toronto? When does community become a kind of ghetto to an outsider? When do we use community to create a sense of home, and when do we use it to keep others out?
The idea of community as a source of self identification came up as a colleague discussed problems he was having finding good software. I – geek, beta addict and general App Downloader Extraordinaire – piped up about one of my default answers, AskMe – that the community on MetaFilter is a huge source of help for finding anything, not only interesting blog posts but as a collaborative knowledge sharing resource. I mentioned that it’s blossomed into quite a community organically – first sharing links, then advice on AskMe, and now a veritable ecosystem of projects, music, jobs, events, and soon, no doubt, the dating site. The fact that it costs $5 to join the community might also keep the spammers out – as does a hugely active moderation effort by the owners of the site. I told my colleague that MetaFilter is in some way a perfect community – self policing, organically evolving to meet the needs of its members. As I went to find an answer at another online haunt (Quora), I wondered how many communities both online and offline I’ve been a part of, and whether choosing to be a conscious member of that community changes how we interact with it – and how we become who we are through self identification, self labeling, and claiming as community. Of the communities I’ve partake in online, the ones that come to mind are the ones I feel passionately connected to as an individual with a community that ‘means’ something – Flickr, the Little Room (a White Stripes community), AskMe; contrast that with other communities I occasionally visit but feel increasingly less connected to – IxDA, Jezebel (a Gawker feminist community until it fell into the sewer) and any number of interests that I’ve had and have faded as the bonds that held that community together have faded. As I’m in between communities – waiting til fall for Downton Abbey to return, gearing up for Mad Men’s return a few weeks ago – I hope to eventually gain a sense of belonging that comes with being a part of something greater than myself, and to create stronger ties to those communities even if time changes my attendance and allegiance to them.
Leave a Reply