2003-06-29 - 9:38 a.m.

community is the most overused word in the american english lexicon right now. we ought to consider retiring it for a while, until it can regenerate some of its original meaning. because for the moment, we've leeched all potential meaning out of the word.

when i worked as a web designer in san francisco, i knew a client didn't know what the hell she was talking about when she overused the word 'community'. one of my first webdesign projects was working on a site for sprint. they were hellbent on implementing a 'community-fostering' technology on the site, which at the time meant supporting a BBS. i'm not sure what community they thought they were going to foster around sprint business services, but at the time relationship marketing was the moneyshot. i'm sure the people we were dealing with had a mandate to get the hipsters at the agency to build sprint some of that newfangled web community. needless to say, noone posted to the BBS and it made the sprint look bad to have an empty chat room as the centerpiece of the relaunch. nature abhors a vaccum, tho, and the webspace was eventually colonised by pornographically-minded teenagers. then sprint wisely killed it.

communities do form on the web. diaryland, friendster, fotolog, and a thousand other flowers blooming in the multiverse show the potential of the internet to connect real people. but most often as a knowledge worker, i was asked to create an artificial sense of community around a corporate interest. the relationship of a corporation to its customers or even of a manufacturer to its end users is not a community. to me, the word 'community' implies that the participants are working towards a common end. 'community' often refer to a physical location, a neighborhood where environmental, commercial, and quality of life issues for all inhabitants overlap and common interests prevail. i feel the jaded hipster hamlet of williamsburg where i live is a community, i also feel the overfertilised sprawl of tract homes where i grew up was a community too. in these cases, the communal project was the enrichment of the physical environment and the people living in it. there must be some balance between the enrichment of the quality of life for all and the quality of life for a few. if that falls out of balance, the project may cease to be communal.

communities happen not just in physical spaces, but also online and in a number of different environments. the communal project might be sharing information about a hobby like oil painting, or fostering romantic connections between the members.

i've spent a lot of time in living rooms and bars and brunches talking about the definition of community. i've begun to wonder if this obsession with community-building and -defining is of special concern to my particular socio-economic strata, the hipsters. (28-38 year-olds, white collar workers from a middle class background, post-secondary education, living in a urban center, you know who you are!) we may have a generational need for collective action.