Connecting culture to place and then establishing the workings of a community within that culture - this is a profound work you are doing Nicola. Your insights here are experiential and thus invaluable. I completely agree to your point that there are failures while creating a sustainable succession organically from the original structure in place. I would also like to add that such failures are meant to create a space or an idea from which major proponent of change, or the next communal succession arises. And as you rightly pointed, the mass of active contributors will have a dominant player who will shape the community in a specific period. I think that is why it is hard to deny or separate the history of a place from its ancestors who once actively shaped that particular community. Both indigenous and foreign ones.
"The hallmark of a mature community is not its outward manifestations such as programs, outreach, or developments; rather, there is an ineffable quality about the people living there that marks their sense of belonging to the place." I cannot emphasize enough on how important this insight is. Cultural assimilation is a process that disintegrates entire communities in its foundational ecosystem if the community as a collective and the individual players lack the essential sense of belonging to the place.
You have given me so much to think about with this piece. I will keep coming back to this essay for reference every time I meditate on community frameworks. Thank you for this essential work!
Thank you so much for this praise, and most importantly your deep understanding of the dynamics at play in community that impact everything we experience through culture. There was not scope in this piece to bring up the sphere of online networks and community in the digital space, perhaps that is a theme we could think about and explore together at a later time!
Ooo very interesting.. The online communities specially the social media is like the wild west of the internet. Both negative and positive elements of the online communities proliferate with such propensities which often seems beyond our control. Specially with the presence of discord where anonymity is normal because of the heavy gaming and crypto influence. It has become a whole another level of complex. After all we are so much more complicated than the simple and devoted soy sauce microbes haha.
I remember this quote, Give people masks and see who they became. I think people show their true nature when no one knows who they are. And that is the identity that they sometimes bring to their specific community. Also because it is online people can be part of multiple communities, say I can be member of substack writers unite, an essentially psychedelic community on clubhouse, and a design community in skillshare member. All this are mutually exclusive of each other and in all I play a different role to help the community either evolve or devolve. This is so interesting to think about!
It'd be very exciting if we could work on this together. 😊
It is a totally different order of community dynamics when you get involved in these kinds of forums! In early drafts of this essay I tried to integrate the discourses of place-based and digital communities but they really operate on wholly separate, almost irreconcilable terms. This could be a theme for us to dive deep on.
My earliest form of socialization as a teenager back in the early 2000s was on chat rooms and through LiveJournal, and it's so interesting to see those dynamics completely normalized on the platforms you have mentioned when back in those days it was geeky and subversive.
There is so much to explore on this and I look forward to collaborating!
Connecting culture to place and then establishing the workings of a community within that culture - this is a profound work you are doing Nicola. Your insights here are experiential and thus invaluable. I completely agree to your point that there are failures while creating a sustainable succession organically from the original structure in place. I would also like to add that such failures are meant to create a space or an idea from which major proponent of change, or the next communal succession arises. And as you rightly pointed, the mass of active contributors will have a dominant player who will shape the community in a specific period. I think that is why it is hard to deny or separate the history of a place from its ancestors who once actively shaped that particular community. Both indigenous and foreign ones.
"The hallmark of a mature community is not its outward manifestations such as programs, outreach, or developments; rather, there is an ineffable quality about the people living there that marks their sense of belonging to the place." I cannot emphasize enough on how important this insight is. Cultural assimilation is a process that disintegrates entire communities in its foundational ecosystem if the community as a collective and the individual players lack the essential sense of belonging to the place.
You have given me so much to think about with this piece. I will keep coming back to this essay for reference every time I meditate on community frameworks. Thank you for this essential work!
Thank you so much for this praise, and most importantly your deep understanding of the dynamics at play in community that impact everything we experience through culture. There was not scope in this piece to bring up the sphere of online networks and community in the digital space, perhaps that is a theme we could think about and explore together at a later time!
Ooo very interesting.. The online communities specially the social media is like the wild west of the internet. Both negative and positive elements of the online communities proliferate with such propensities which often seems beyond our control. Specially with the presence of discord where anonymity is normal because of the heavy gaming and crypto influence. It has become a whole another level of complex. After all we are so much more complicated than the simple and devoted soy sauce microbes haha.
I remember this quote, Give people masks and see who they became. I think people show their true nature when no one knows who they are. And that is the identity that they sometimes bring to their specific community. Also because it is online people can be part of multiple communities, say I can be member of substack writers unite, an essentially psychedelic community on clubhouse, and a design community in skillshare member. All this are mutually exclusive of each other and in all I play a different role to help the community either evolve or devolve. This is so interesting to think about!
It'd be very exciting if we could work on this together. 😊
It is a totally different order of community dynamics when you get involved in these kinds of forums! In early drafts of this essay I tried to integrate the discourses of place-based and digital communities but they really operate on wholly separate, almost irreconcilable terms. This could be a theme for us to dive deep on.
My earliest form of socialization as a teenager back in the early 2000s was on chat rooms and through LiveJournal, and it's so interesting to see those dynamics completely normalized on the platforms you have mentioned when back in those days it was geeky and subversive.
There is so much to explore on this and I look forward to collaborating!
Oh oh, you are so right about this. I remember being on orkut and my school friends treating me as if I'm doing something shady. 😀
Yes please, let's collaborate. 😊