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ChatteParfaitt -> RE: what fucking community? (8/13/2011 1:16:35 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
Or a 'debating community'. [;)]
Some time back I went to an academic conference, during which a bloke was giving a paper on the meaning of the word 'community'. It had become a buzzword by the time of Blair's government, and people were using it everywhere. The press pounced on it as well as academics (particularly in the social sciences). Blairites had come to love it because, in employing it, they could counter Thatcher's social atomism (cf 'There is no society . . .'), but without having to go all the way to talking about 'society' in any way that was redolent of the now hated word, 'socialism'. After many years following in the neoliberal hue, the Right came to love the word, too: it was sufficiently fluffy to articulate a kind of conservatism that was no longer Thatcherite, but didn't convey any idea of 'social engineering' (which has always been a horror to the right wing).
But then everyone went kind of masturbatory over it. 'Community' came to be applied to any group that had any identifiably common characteristic whatsoever. Private Eye began a regular thread for people to send in their silly examples for a tenner ('The boot-wearing community' and 'bus-travelling community' were two of the more inane that I recall offhand.)
Sociologists had traditionally spoken of the two types of human association, from Tonnies, of
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. A 'community', the aforementioned bloke at the conference was arguing, once implied some sense of the former - that is a community in, roughly, the cosy, human-contact sense.
For me, it's pretty evident that we have at least some of that 'Gemeinschaft' sense here, on CM. But what muddies the picture, as so often, is the fact that we're now in the brave new world of the interwebs. I've hardly met anyone from here and don't even really know what they look like. In contrast, I know the first names of plenty of people at my local pub, but don't know the first thing about their deeper views of life - as I do here, regarding quite a few people.
Nonetheless, there's only a certain amount of mud I'm prepared to wade through. For me, the word 'community' has been hijacked too completely to be worth anything anymore. For 'community', you could now read 'group of people' or, re Tonnies, any 'association' of them. Too much of the debate is now just tiresome semantics.
So, this is a long-winded way of my saying: Who cares? ;)
The meaning of the word community is in flux. It used to mean a group of humans interacting in a common location, which was a fine definition in 1810.
Now we have so many ways to interact on virtual locations, that people are wanting to take the location component out of the definition. They are wrong, IMO.
You can't really call boot wearers a community unless / until they have the opportunity to interact at a common location. B/c it is that very interaction that sociologists wish to document in their attempts to (culturally) evaluate a community.
The question of "is there an umbrella community that oversees all other BDSM communities?" is nonsense. The overall BDSM community has never been globally organized and has limited structure.
(That we don't agree on things, even basic definitions, is a component of our social interaction, it doesn't in any way bar us from being a community.)
What I take issue with applies to the boot wearers as much to the BDSMers. Although both "communities" of people may have the option of connecting in a common location (i.e. the internet), unless all members of all communities actually interact online, from a sociological viewpoint, it is not a global community.
So you can call all boot wearers who interact, virtually or not, a community, just as you can call all BDSMers who interact, virtually or not, a community.
It does leave out all those possible members who may have similar interests but who don't interact with others in the community.
Reasons why the definition of community is so very changeable these days.
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