Skip to main content

Thoughts on community (Part Two-Virtual)

Now that I am blogging that now involves me in a particular realm of cyber-community. I can't help thinking how many communities there are, and wondering what makes a community a community.

Being a new mom, I sometimes read a working moms bulletin board. I find it interesting to see what other women are worried about, and occasionally post to answer a question, but I personally do not feel connected to a "community" there. In fact one of the things that is interesting to me is the fact that there is so much diversity--women who want to be working, women who have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet but would rather be home, women in unstable relationships and those happily married. Despite these differences, it is clear from the posts that many of the women do feel it is community and the board is a place of safe refuge--a home even, as per my last post.

But I wonder is it one community of "working moms" or in fact many communities with overlapping memberships? And in fact is this the reality of any "community" made up of more than a handful of people?

Comments

Nancy White said…
Alexandra, I enjoyed diving into your blog (via Dina) and especially your posts on community, a topic near and dear to my heart. I'm currently co-working on a report on technologies for communities of practice and one of the issues that we've had on the table, raised by our fearless leader Etienne Wenger, is the implications of multimembership. How do we manage "belonging" to all these "communties" from a personal and technological perspectives.

Since I have started blogging, this question has ballooned. I was not sure about connecting the world blog and community but it is there.

Keep on blogging!
11:44 PM
Alex said…
Hi Nancy-
I will be very interested in your report! I wonder if the management of communities is different from the personal and technological perspectives...do we have technologies that allow us to mimic the personal, or do our personal interactions start to change because of assisting technologies?
9:22 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anthropology and advertising?

I read an interesting article on trend forecasting today. I've always found this fascinating (and wonder how much anybody checks later to see if the forecasters were right). The only thing that bothered me about this one, and this is not new, is the claim that what they do is like cultural anthropology. This is not a diss on advertising, marketing, trend forecasting, or any of the other fields that claim to be like anthropology--these folks to interesting work. I am just annoyed at the claim itself. Granted, we anthropologists are not always good at advertising ourselves...in that we offer a holistic approach, and theoretical insight based on our training. So anybody who observes people is now an anthropologist. Or is it just that Americans are so used to sound bites that they don't understand the nuanced differences in anything? Sigh.
2 comments
Read more

To Label or Not to Label?

Blogger now not only allows me to tag my posts (that's label in google talk for some reason), but I can display for all my readers the labels and how often I have used them. For now I have added that widget (see right side of the screen). At first, I thought I would go back to all my old posts and tag them (maybe I still will). Then it seemed daunting. Then I worried about being somewhat consistent in my tagging, so that a reader could clearly see that I write a lot about anthropology, or social media. But then I looked at my posts and realized I actually write about a lot of different things. So if I start labeling, do I end up with just a long list of tags? Or do I then feel a need to constrain what I write about to a defined set of categories? I realize blogs with a theme are powerful...and I think I have some themes running through here...interspersed with random thoughts or items that catch my interest. What to do? Does it matter? Is there meaning in tags (beyond the me
Post a Comment
Read more

Yammer and distractions

We had a very interesting teleconference with some folks from Yammer on Friday. It was a great opportunity to learn about best practices and for our security minded folks to ask questions in that arena. There were probably 10 or 12 people on the call, mostly non-colocated, and several were live yammering the call. While I didn't add posts describing the content of the call, I did join into the discussions. It was an interesting experience for me. It was nice to have the side conversations, but I have to admit it was also distracting. Is it any less rude or distracted than emailing in a face to face meeting? I suppose since it was based in teh content of the meeting it may bedifferent...I know others found value in reading the yams later. I should perhaps fess up to trying to do some other work as well, but I know it distracted me and I am trying (not always successfully) to cut down on the mutlitasking to be more focused. My most important reminder to try not to be distracted is Ju
1 comment
Read more