Anyway

Someone asked me the other day whether blogs were com­munit­ies. This got me to think­ing about how we define com­munit­ies in the online space. And friends, and fol­low­ers, and how some social net­work­ing sites encour­age enlar­ging the social circle while oth­ers con­cen­trate on people you already know through other means. “Social circle” being extremely loosely defined, of course, just as the term “friend” is much more loosely defined in the online space than in the phys­ical, face-to-face world.

So let’s play with some ideas for a defin­i­tion of com­munity. If you have other ideas, please add them to the com­ments and if you think I’m wrong, tell me why; maybe we can come up with a com­munity defin­i­tion of com­munity. Which leads of course to the real­isa­tion that I do think blogs (some blogs, any­way) con­sti­tute a community.

A com­munity is a group of people who inter­act with each other in some forum. How’s that for a begin­ning? Not too bad, but it doesn’t really nail down very much; the line-up in your local cof­fee shop could be seen as a com­munity under this defin­i­tion. We need to add a tem­poral aspect: mem­bers of the com­munity inter­act with each other over a period of time (this rules out the cof­fee shop line-up). And at least some mem­bers of the com­munity have to be act­ive within the com­munity (a social forum where nobody posts any­thing is not a com­munity by this defin­i­tion). This last is more fuzzy (what does “act­ive” mean?) but I think is necessary.

The defin­i­tion of com­munity needs an “act­ive” aspect since in my opin­ion for a blog to be con­sidered a com­munity, people read­ing it have to com­ment on it. Oth­er­wise it isn’t a com­munity, it’s a pub­lish­ing method. We could get into dis­cus­sions about whether a spoke-and-hub inter­ac­tion model where read­ers com­ment on the posts but not on each oth­ers’ com­ments is still inter­ac­tion, or whether you neeed a many-to-many inter­ac­tion model (which is closer to what most people think of in the phys­ical world as a com­munity), but I think that’s a detail. What’s import­ant is that the com­mu­nic­a­tion in the com­munity flows in more than one dir­ec­tion. Mind you, the word “inter­act” is a verb, which implies an action, so adding the adverb “act­ively” to it is a tau­to­logy, which I try to avoid.

This leaves: A com­munity is a group of people who inter­act with each other over a period of time in some forum. Not per­fect, but not bad for a start.