Shirky, AKMA and Scaling Care

I was going to respond to Clay Shirky‘s welcome article on communities and audiences. He’s one of my favorite thinker guys. But another of my favorite thinker guys, AKMA, beat me to it. And AKMA’s piece is just superb.

I’ve long been suspicious of the term “community” when applied to the Internet, for in the real world, a community is a group of people who know one another and care about one another (not, as Clay says, “groups whose members actively communicate with one another” — there’s not enough juice in that phrase). The Internet is letting us form groups of members who know one another in some sense and care about one another in some sense, but we don’t yet know which senses. The fact that “lurking” has a positive sense on the Net is new. Even the intermittency of Net groups is new. So, the tokens by which a RW community constitutes itself — the howdies on the street, the pot roast dinners supplied when a member is in mourning — aren’t the same as on the Web. Thus, the limits to scaling aren’t yet known. Online groups whose members care about one another are neither communities nor audiences. We don’t yet know what they are. We thus don’t yet know how they’ll scale. And, the single most exciting aspect of the Web is, for me, that it’s letting us find out what human caring is possible of when the constraints of space, time and — most important — remembering people’s names are removed.

Categories: Uncategorized dw