Thinking About Online Communications
Finding Your Own Special Community
By Phil Shapiro
Last month I started a subscription to a new mailing list (listserv)
that has me all excited about mailing lists again. This new mailing list, WWWEDU,
discusses the uses of the world wide web for educational purposes.
__ For the past three years I've been an active participant
in the Kidsphere mailing list, one of the largest worldwide mailing lists for educators.
The Kidsphere community is vibrant, hopping, varied, and interesting. It is also
populated with quite a large number of newbies. (For those who might not know, "newbies"
is the term used to describe newcomers to the online world.)
__ To be sure, I like newbies. They often bring with
them new ideas, new energy, and new insights. But I don't want to spend all my time
hanging out with newbies. That would be like hanging out for four years in the freshman
lounge in high school.
__ The WWWEDU crowd tends to be more technically knowledgeable.
On WWWEDU you don't often see the question, "Where do I plug in the phone line
that comes out of the back of my modem?"
__ For now, WWWEDU is my own special online community.
It's the community I most closely identify with. I haven't disowned Kidsphere yet.
Just that I've shifted some of my time and energy to participating in the WWWEDU
community.
__ And as I make that shift, I've taken to thinking
about what it is that makes a person identify with a community. People identify with
a community, online or offline, for all sorts of different reasons. Usually a community
is composed of people who share a similar outlook and values as you do. Usually community
members are people who find themselves in somewhat of a similar situation to yourself.
Community
Communities are composed of stated and unstated rules and guidelines of behavior.
Courtesy to fellow community members is an underlying theme of all communities. When
the courtesy begins to break down, the strength of the community itself begins to
erode.
__ In terms of listserv communities, the entire existence
of the community is invented by the community members each and every day. Within
the general confines of the listserv subject-matter, listserv subscribers can choose
to post any sort of public message they wish.
__ Some of the messages posted to listservs are truly
remarkable. About once a week I read a listserv message that resounds with community
spirit, written in a way that makes me feel proud to be a member of that community.
You can almost feel the personal presence of the person who wrote such a message.
Who they are, as a human being, is carried forth in the words they choose to write.
__ While I'm currently quite fond of the WWWEDU community,
I'm quite sure that I'll be moving on to other "special communities" as
I come to more closely connect with others of shared interest. I won't leave WWWEDU
permanently behind. Just that I'll shift my time and energy to participating in the
community that most closely vibrates in harmony with my own personal vibes.
Can a person ever get too much community?
Me thinks not. The human animal is above all a social animal. We are most alive when
we are participating in social interactions.
__ Social interactions, interspersed
with lively intellectual exchanges, are the hallmarks of a successful online community.
A community is something that you feel proud to belong to and committed to supporting.
Communities nourish the soul, and ask only that the soul nourish the community in
return.
Phil Shapiro
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