Accidental Communities

Joe Mahoney writes in response to my comment that “a community is a group of people who know one another and care about one another,” which was in response to Clay Shirky’s article on whether communities scale:

Richard Ford once said that he liked community a lot better in theory than in practice. That’s my experience as well. It’s also that of many people I know. It’s a peculiar word, in that I think of it as conveying something which in real life is rarely delivered: i.e., people knowing and caring about each other. In its most common usage, the reality it signifies seems to be people who are tossed together because of affinities that are less deep than those strong attractors that get people communicating without physical proximity on the web: E.g. my neighborhood community vs. the people I share poetry with on the net. Certainly the former are people with whom I have concerns in common: property tax, trash collection, noisy parties. But if it goes deeper, that’s likely to be accidental. The latter are people I interact with because the affinity comes first and proximity doesn’t matter. I’m thinking the web stands a much better chance of making community live up to its semantic implications than the non-web. It’s a community I embrace in practice as well as in theory.

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