Community 1: traditional contexts

Let's start with a traditional dictionary definition: community is a “state of being shared or held in common; fellowship … organized political, municipal, or social body; body of people living in the same locality; body of people having religion, profession etc. in common…” (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1986). 

What key words strike you in this definition? Take note of those terms and then consider them in the light of what scientist and humanitarian Ursula M. Franklin has to say about relations between community and technology. In The Real World of Technology (1999), Franklin strongly emphasizes locale in her critique of the effects of electronic technology on community.  Comparing a community’s structure to a cake, Franklin notes

Imagine the whole world as a round cake; its wedge-shaped slices are states or countries.  As residents of a slice, we are closer to adjacent slices than to more distant ones.  Within the slice we can picture social mobility as a vertical structuring, rearrangements of place between, say, the crumb of the bottom and the icing on the top, with the raisins in between.  Community, then, is locality, as is its representation … Throughout history, language, law, and custom have been identified vertically in terms of locale; locale has been slice dependent … Yet slices were rarely completely isolated; exchanges across the cuts—whether state borders or boundaries of language and ethnicity—have always existed, more likely, of course, between adjacent slices than between distant ones (1999, p. 158).

Thus far, you'll have noted sharing, common, fellowship, organization, and locality among the key concepts that define community. Franklin contends that community relies to a large extent on physical locale and believes we can’t genuinely experience community through the mediation of electronic technology. Her concept of "a genuine community" is also inseparable from reciprocity, the interpersonal give-and-take that she argues can take place only through live contact.

What do you think?

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