What does community mean to you?
Since it was Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, I found myself thinking: Would the holocaust be possible in a time like today when we have the internet, online communities, and blogs? In an age of endless networking and community building, what do these communities really mean to us? How do we define a community today?
If a mass killing were to happen now, how would we all react? Would we reach out to those from our online communities who need our help? Would we take care of each other and write about it in our blogs, asking governments to take action? Would we digg and delicious our posts, giving them a common tag on technorati in hope that they reach the widest possible audience? Would we open a flickr account so we could share photos and upload a video to YouTube? In a social networking age like today, how would we deal?
When you enter an online community. you start building your profile, uploading videos and pictures, blogging, adding your favorite sites and widgets. You share little bits and pieces of yourself with your community hoping that members will be interested enough to go through the pieces, and also share a couple of their own. In any such network, you will probably make some connections. Certain people like to explore and learn about others before making them contacts, while others simply add contacts randomly. Some approve every request for a connection whereas others have certain criteria for approving a contact. Everyone’s behavioral patterns are different.
You may start chatting, skyping, emailing, perhaps even meeting your connections in person. But how close do you feel to your online connections? If they need you, will you be there? What meaning do these connections take on for you? Given the large number of contacts that we each have in the various communities, is it even possible to form personal connections with everyone? Probably not, Just like in real life, you will most often make deeper connections with certain members than others. Are these connections that we can depend on?
I’d like to believe that community and sharing have not become empty words in our lexicon and that we’re not using the word community only to define a business model that prevents churn. I can only hope that in an age where open communication has been made so easy, horrible tragedies like the Holocaust could not happen again. Hopefully we will never need to find out.
I would like to thank John Suler for the brilliant pic.
Technorati tags: holocaust, community, internet, blogs, digg, delicious, technorati, flickr, youtube, social networking, contacts, skyping, sharing, John Suler
April 18th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Hey,
Great post. In terms of what we would do if there was a genocide taking place, there is a genocide taking place currently. It is taking place in Darfur. You may want to read a little more about it at Save Darfur or view the Wikipedia entry. Hope this helps shed some light.
Best Regards,
Nick
April 18th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Dear nick:
Thanks very much for bringing this up. It really is horrific, the genocide taking place over there:
“At least 400,000 people have been killed; more than 2 million innocent civilians have been forced to flee their homes and now live in displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad; and more than 3.5 million men, women, and children are completely reliant on international aid for survival.”
I signed the petition demanding international action and dugg/delicious’d it. I did notice that it was actually already submitted on both sites.
April 19th, 2007 at 6:37 am
As Nick intimates, online communities with their blogging and all the other paraphernalia have not stopped genocides. At the most, people are more aware of what is going on. But as for helping in any meaningful way, well, I don’t see it.
Best wishes,
Larry
April 19th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Larry:
Don’t you think awareness is the number one step towards action?
April 19th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I suppose awareness is better than non-awareness. But awareness on its own doesn’t seem to solve any problems. It can have any of these effects: it makes people (1) feel guilty, (2) feel they should help, but there is nothing they can do, (3) inform other people, (4) get up and do something about the situation. The point is - and this is not theory, but, as we can see, is actually happening - number 4 is the only one that is not happening. So while it is true that more people are aware today than ever before about what is happening in the world, it would be difficult to show that there is more action being taken because of this awareness. So even if you are right (and you are), the first step doeasn’t seem to translate into a second or third step.
April 19th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Larry:
I disagree. I think that through these social tools, people are informing others and are taking action. Some will probably be more active than others and as you say it is hard to calculate their effectiveness, but still these information channels are invaluable and are at least a first step towards doing something about it.
April 20th, 2007 at 5:45 am
Sadly enough, we can now compare between Drafur and VT. in VT we had tons of videos by students, blog involvement etc. In Darfur - nothing much. Maybe it is because Darfur as an area is not that advanced technologically. and maybe it is because people still don’t care about Darfur enough to create content about it.
Re the idea of community - I see it as a hyped business jargon, that just like ease of use, helps websites to increase switching costs of users. Having said that, there are communities out there that are successful - maybe because they offer also an offline experience (I am thinking podcamp).
And maybe we need new words. maybe we need to have one word for the business tool, and one for human need.
April 20th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Kfir:
I think that there hasn’t been enough coverage of what’s happening in Darfur because as you said, they are less technologically advanced. They don’t have PC’s at their disposal, moreover, they certainly do not have flickr or digg accounts.
In VT it was the VT community that spread the news - here we are looking at a situation where the outside world needs to care enough to do the work for Darfur.