Communities and Circles

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.