Having used Dreamweaver to post a bloggish page for some time, I'm giving the more "traditional" blog look a try. For those of you who are looking for the recent debate with Clay Shirky, here it is:
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Clay Shirkey and I are at it again, this time arguing about the meaning of community....
I wrote a short reply to a question about community size on Jerry Michalski's mailing list, pointing out that, for what it is worth, simian groups seem to exist cohesively in groups of up to 70, at which point they tend to splinter to create a new colony that departs from the original community. If the American colonies are any example, human communities nearer to a "state of nature" than we exist today tended to split when they reached a few hundred. The splits came not just because of ideological differences (which we tend to mythologize) but also because of resource constraints in the face of a "hostile" environment.
David Isenberg, perhaps sensing the opportunity to enjoy a good fight, pointed to this essay, "Communities, Audiences and Scale," on Clay's website in reply to my comment.
I replied: Not to get into another row with Clay, but I don't think community is a primarily mathematical challenge that can be described as more complex simply due to size. There are human factors, from individual personality to the ability to piggyback on existing relationships, thus streamlining the complexity Clay describes, when joining a community that makes it all very dynamic. One schizophrenic dropped into, say, a protestant coffeehouse, can turn the whole idea of community upside-down.
I agree with the distinction Clay makes between community and audience, though I don't see how he progressed to his conclusions about "engagement" since one person or millions can become engaged with an idea (e.g., the popularity of Harry Potter, which every child and most parents I know can explain to me in exquisite detail). It is the perception of the recipient of an idea--the sense they have that the author or artist or rhetorician speaks directly to them--that can transform audience into community. The intent of the sender and medium chosen for sending the message have less to do with the ultimate sense of community created. The Net speeds and amplifies this phenomenon.
I worked on a project for AOL with John Borthwick (you out there, John?) a few years ago, when Digital Cities was designing its local community interface. The key, then, and now I think, was to make it possible for audience to become community by seizing hold of a particular topic and organizing around it. So, the site could talk about nightlife or exercise in Manhattan while allowing individuals to make a date or organize a group run within their own neighborhood (which could be defined geographically, demographically or by shared interest). It is possible to roll back and forth, but you have to know where to be careful.
I wrote a lot about community and technology way way back when, and would only point to the work of Seymour Sarason (author of "The Psychological Sense of Community" and my favorite, "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies"), a Yale community psychologist, as one of my key influences. One of these days, I am going to get all of Digital Media's archives online.
You might have read these two essays in the Digital Kapital series I did a few years back, when I got all mathematical (albeit, though still relatively simple-minded about math), on the value of Web sites based on the number of connections occurring on the Web in 1998.
Clay posted a response, pointing out that he had not had time to reply to my last essay about his "Half The World" essay because he is editing a version of that tome for WIRED. He said we "verge" on the definition of community, and I reply:
Let's focus on the divergence (I believe that's what you meant, because "verge," among other things is a word for "penis" as well as the tendency to incline toward something): I would generally favor the higher standard of community, that of ongoing and purposive cooperation with the ability to scale the scope of inclusion over time. These communities are ignited by messages (even neighbors who live next door to one another can exist outside one another's community, until a common cause unites them), and thus my use of the artist-to-audience suggestion. But, let me take it a bit deeper, drawing on Habermas' idea of communicative action, which requires mutual interpretation by the participants in a community of the signals they send to one another.
Note that I used a variety of types of speakers, artists (authors and artists, specifically) and rhetoricians, primarily to convey the idea that different types of messages catalyze communities. If it was clumsily done, hopefully this clarifies the idea that the initiator of the message becomes part of a community only in interaction with the audience, who start talking back, as well as amongst themselves about the idea.
Habermas says in "On the Pragmatics fo Communication": "The task of mutual interpretation, then, is to achieve a new definition of the situation that all participants can share." In other words, the idea is refined through interaction between members of the community. As the idea changes, so does the community -- they are living things. At this point it is easy to get reductive and start treating community like it is a biological thing, and then you get all the biological metaphors thrown around by folks like Kevin Kelly. He tends to attribute to "emergent phenomena" what is actually the result of purposive action shaped by communication. It is clear to me that he does this to support the idea that unbridled development is the only way to reach an optimum outcome, and that is foolish; people shape their world through a variety of social mechanisms, including the market, government and the church.
Here we come to Sarason, the psychologist I mentioned before. There is a long passage in his "Psychological Sense of Community" about, in a nutshell, sampling bias in the definition of a community. He uses the problem of explaining baseball to an Englishman as his example. First off, there is the problem of all the social and cultural features that make it an entertaining game (I happen to be a member of the church of baseball, and can be very mystical about the game.) Then, there is the problem of the relationship of baseball, the game, to baseball economics and the economics of the world around baseball. How does it all fit together. If you stay on any one level, you have no real sense of the community. However, for the most part popular writers on community do reduce the dynamics to relatively simple relationships to the detriment of understanding.
There is another aspect of how we perceive our world, which Doc Searls introduced me to a few years ago while we were walking along Broadway with Steve Larsen near midnight. This is the metaphorical structure of perception by a person trapped firmly in their physical body, and it is being developed by George Lakoff and others in their work on the embodied mind -- I believe this is some of the most important philosophical and linguistic work in the past century and the coming century.
These metaphorical sub-texts that color our mutual interpretations and our communities as they evolve, making the formulae for each community largely unique. These metaphorical colors are why most communities viewed from the outside, whether historically or by contemporaries seem eccentric as hell.
Now, to Clay's point that his article wasn't about people's engagement with ideas but with one another: The act of communication is inseparable from the ideas exchanged by participants in any dialog or community. And, the transformation of a world of Harry Potter readers into a community comes at the moment they begin to share their ideas, to mutually interpret in Habermas' conception of purposive communication. You can see this happen in Net chats about HP or between two children who, meeting for the first time, negotiate their interpretation of HP to play make-believe with one being Harry, another Ron, the third Hermione and so on. They are, roughly speaking, a community in your definition, that of a communicating group, while playing the game or chatting about HP online.
(Pardon me, I have to go read The Lord of the Rings to my kids -- it's bedtime.)
I don't think that simple communication among members of a group is sufficient to qualify as community. I don't agree that the term is pliant, rather it is applied without rigor. According to the OED, community evolved from the Latin for fellowship or a community of relations or feelings into a medieval term that signified a "body of fellows or fellow-townsmen." The more modern term clearly indicates that community endures in time, and this is more evident in contemporary usage since we tend to describe places or groups of people anchored by shared places as communities.
The idea that fires the commonality is critical to the emergence of community; leaders use ideas to coalesce a community. I would not argue that the artist, rhetorician, manager or politician creates community simply by communicating to an audience, but community can arise from the idea communicated, even if the initiator never interacts with anyone. Neither does communication in and of itself make a person a member of a community. In fact, communication is the medium of segregation, in that I can put up a sign that says "Negroes not allowed on country club grounds" and have successfully communicated with the local black population without establishing a community with them.
So, I would not agree that you are talking about community, but communication.
I wrote an essay as part of the Digital Kapital series, called "Of Hank and the Net's Quest for Relevance" that examines the confusion of communication with community, in which I observed: "Online relationships are convenient, like voting for the late Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf [in the People Magazine Most Beautiful People Poll]. We exchange messages sporadically with others and, when something bad happens to someone, we act as though acknowledging the misfortune is the same as living through it. You can get the same kind of experience watching television. This does not mean that the Internet is bad for us, nor even that television is bad for us. It is different than physical experience, but not better or worse. How we use it is the fundamental question. The Net does allow us to cultivate distant friends with greater ease than at any time. We have to decide to use it for noble purposes, or we give way to trivial actions that make us all little more than bad performance artists. Doing everything just for the hell of it is the same as shutting down our critical faculties and diving into the sitcom world of television. The elevation of Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf to the Olympus of People-approved beauty is not a demonstration of the power of the people, only of the Net's facility for communicating the people's will."
It is easy to mistake will for leadership. Will can exist completely independently from social contracts and responsibility (just look at the fetid philosophy of Ayn Rand). Leadership can exist without responsibility, but it does not lead a community, but a mob. Leadership within a community requires responsibility and accountability through communication among the members of the community; this is why communities endure and don't break up like a game of make-believe. Communities grow through openness and adaptation, both by the community and newcomers to the community through mutual interpretation via communication.
Previous New News Things
Telemelt-down?
Half a world and the Wunderkind
Patience and Statesmanship
Death, starring Robert Blake; The Mid-East Dance
Trade Feint [RatcliffeBlog]
8:23:34 AM 
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