What IS Community?
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I have, in the last few months, been made consciously aware of the communities I inhabit.
First to be summarily removed from the university environment; my friends, my church, to be planted back home with only the light of my laptop screen to replace the warm affection and genuine conversation I had grown so used to. Back home has its own challenges, as anyone who has moved back into their parental home can attest to; I love my brother, but nobody sings their best with the headphones on and the music loud. Being at home was as if community had been taken away, and I felt it’s lack in the constant negotiation and deliberate rebuilding that had to be done online, both in Canterbury and with my hometown friends. It just wasn’t easy anymore (sighed the whole world, probably).
Slowly, the endless zoom calls became routine, and friendly faces through wires became the new normal. So? you ask, half the world did that too - you didn’t come here to hear me moan. I’m not special at all! I did begin to notice a new kind of community though, one built online, built in thousands of bumps up against another, familiar screen names and inside jokes. Our little corner of the internet. Which actually didn’t look all that different to IRL communities, either.
I took the opportunity to read a book last month. Shocker, I know. It’s surprisingly prescient, for having been announced last year. (It came out in June.) For example, it contains the line “...no matter how fantastic an apartment you live in, it sucks to never leave it for weeks on end.”
“...no matter how fantastic an apartment you live in, it sucks to never leave it for weeks on end.” - Hank Green
Yup. It feels clairvoyant in more ways than that though. It is actually the second half of a book that came out in 2018, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing [click here for the audiobook] - in the same vein as the first, the new one is called A Beautifully Foolish Endeavour. No spoilers; but April May got famous documenting an alien encounter, and now the aliens have gone and they’ve left humanity reeling and divided and a mysterious company claiming to have made something like alien tech. The first one touches on the internet and society and fame; this one looks at power - who should have it, if anyone should have it; the power of fear and the power of the internet (again. Hank Green, the author, has spent the last decade of his professional career on youtube, so perhaps it is understandable). But it’s also about humanity, faced with an unknown existential threat and a stuttering economy, staring down fear and inequality in a new and unprecedented reality. Sound familiar?
The story is inextricably connected with the internet in its storytelling, and is also essential to the narrative. It is unambiguous in its assertion that the internet is, in fact, a place, and one where communities build themselves and can be used as a tool. It is not separate from the ‘real world’. When I was feeling sad about being ripped away from the place I called home, I was grieving the lack of somewhere to put roots, and I thought community had to be grounded in a physical place. Taking stock again, my definition of place had expanded, but I was still left with the same question; can a community survive without a place to be? What would a community without a space look like? Is it possible at all? What IS community?
"I thought community had to be grounded in a physical place.."
Is community steady, and ever changing?
Must it be grounded in a place? What about in online space? Is it enough to sustain it?
Is it all community needs to have your love oriented in the same direction as other people you care about?
(Thanks, John Green, and the recent Liverpool Premier League win, for that one!)
I started writing this, hoping that I could shake loose some "knackiger Spruch", some elevator pitch for you to take away and chew over. But I don’t have any answers, or a cohesive or concise something to give you. It definitely isn't for me to say what a community can and cannot be, nor should I, in ~800 words; I expect there are entire journals dedicated to the study of such things. I can, however, give my two cents. Perhaps it would be good to spend a bit thinking about, (and being thankful for?) the communities built around you, whether institutional or informal, whether you had a hand in laying the brickwork or was welcomed into the shelter later. Because, well, gratitude is generally a positive force, and we can all have some more of that.
Maybe community is only its members, after all ;)
