I had an opportunity to attend a session at DevLearn titled “What Does Community Mean in 2017“. Julian Stodd and Trina Rimmer provided both theoretical and practical thoughts and experiences throughout. I was left thinking on this flight home about how today we truly believe anything is possible and that anything can and must happen quickly. But the notion that one can create a community or worse can do so with a click of a button is equally puzzling and disheartening. Many justify this by simply removing key principles of community and altering the definition. In the name of some twisted progress or economic purpose they ignore long held research about nature and human history. Community has gone from being about groups with a shared purpose, building trust through sincere and consistent behavior and necessary interdependence between all members to now being pitched as followers of a Facebook page who periodically “like” a video.
The word community for many equates to a feature on a social platform or the activities of traditional customer service now done online. You may say “it’s just a word” but I say it’s a slippery slope when people try and remake human activities in technology. Fortunately 10,000 years of human development can’t be changed with the advent of Web 2.0. Call me negative, but I celebrate the many failures of social platforms that I read about and the struggles of strategies formed around re-engineered concepts. These failures are usually a result of trying to simplify the complex through bells and whistles and reduce human social institutions to being just words. I have faith that slowly, like the march of evolution itself, our technology will actually come back to meet us right where we are and who we are.
