Shut up about the “blogging community” already
I normally ignore the “We need to PROTECT teh pwecious blogging c0mmunity!!!!!!111111″ kind of rubbish from the usual (ignorant, deluded, collectivist) suspects, but having lately heard echoes of it from people who should know better, I think it’s time to say this:
People do not blog “for the sake of the community”. Individuals blog because they get something out of it, and the fact that it is entirely up to them to determine the nature and context of how they interact with the countless communities which live in the online world is a feature, not a bug, as I recently quoted:
A lot has been written and powerpointed about the social and the communal on the internet, most of it missing the point. By a wide margin. Community is not a ‘collective’, it is a voluntary association of individuals drawn to something that motivates them to sustain the connection over time. It is a web of such connections between autonomous individuals who are happy to congregate because they feel understood, captivated and derive value from the association.
And as I said at that time:
Community for the sake of community will always be doomed, as will the marginalisation of the individual. This is true offline as well as online, though for some reason a lot of people find the concept highly offensive and ’selfish’ when applied to the offline world.
I believe in people, not systems and not imagined hierarchies. How about you?
Filed under: Blogging, Individuality vs Collectivism, Life
This is one of my pain-points. I resist any attempt to drag me into any mass organization, any communal identity, any party-like association. Being booed for it, thrown mud at, and lost friends over it.
I’m not an obidient ant.
What about all the blog clubs and blog groups that people set up and join? I don’t get it. Not for me.
That’s the point, Mark: You define how you interact with various communities, you’re not clubbed over the head and forced to join “for the sake of the community”. Long may it be so.
Well, you’re right, “community”, “network”, “society”, etc., are just words we use as convenient labels to help us get a grip on what some number of individuals are up to. “Community” itself has been especially overused, with folks applying it to any otherewise disparate batch of people who they perceive to share one thing in common. So, we hear talk of “the community of XYZ fans banded together to support their heroes…” when no “banding” likely happened at all.
The problem comes when some people begin to treat the “community” as if it really existed, valuing its existence more than the group’s shared interests. That drives them to begin enforcing membership rules, purging the roles of dissidents, inventing a hierarchy and ensuring their place in it, etc.
Nothing new there, really. We’re political creatures and that’s what we do: act individually to feather our own nests, often at the obvious expense of others.
We’re political creatures and that’s what we do: act individually to feather our own nests, often at the obvious expense of others.
Speak for yourself, dude.
Absolutely. Self interest is at the heart of community - people form them because they serve a purpose and are likely to deliver a sum benefit to all involved greater than they would get from pursuing whatever goals the community
We evolved the ability - and the desire - to be social, community joining creatures. Because it worked. It delivered rewards.
We’re also finely tuned as bullshit detectors - when a community is not working and the alternatives (another communtiy, doing stuff solo) are more likely to be rewarding we’re likely to go and do that instead.
“Speak for yourself, dude.”
Resources — of all kinds — are always limited. Everything we have means someone else doesn’t have it, regardless of how altruistic we might be.
In any case, people often seek community in order to compete with people in other communities.
> Resources — of all kinds — are always limited.
That little bugger appears to be one of the most persistent myths around.
Matter is limited. Energy is limited. (Though both are so huge that no mere human is ever going to get near those limits.) Resources equals [matter plus energy] multiplied by ingenuity, and ingenuity is infinite. This is particularly apparent in the IT domain (which is what’s being discussed here), where anything may be duplicated at virtually zero cost in matter or energy.
> Everything we have means someone else doesn’t have it, regardless of how altruistic we might be.
Tell me, in what way did Newton’s publication of the Principia lead to other people not having revolutionary knowledge about the universe?