Draining the Life From 'Community'

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/draining-the-life-from-community.html

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NEW YORK — If you don’t belong to a community these days, you’re really on your own.

But never fear. “Community” has become one of those words that should always have quotation marks around it. Words get hijacked all the time, but this is one of those really violent, eight-country, stop-for-refueling hijackings.

Actual communities in which people know each other, do things for each other and act in concert may be on the decline. But new meanings of community are rushing to fill the void.

In U.S. government-speak, there’s the “intelligence community,” which every crisis reveals to be not much of a community at all. There’s a “scientific community,” but they quarrel over citations like toddlers. There’s the “European Community”; you know how that’s going. In Silicon Valley, there is a “developer community” of headphones-wearing techies who speak to no one and play video games alone. There’s a “business community,” whose members seek to put each other out of business. Entire races are called “communities,” however gaping their internal divisions. The religious, who always seem to be emerging from or heading into a schism, belong to the monolithic “faith community.”

These new uses of “community” are about more than semantics. They offer clues to our present-day culture. They bespeak a world less tethered to place than before; uncomfortable with top-down leadership even if still dependent on it; saturated by business logic but determined to disguise the tawdriness of selling; obsessed with networking and also embarrassed by it.

Go back a century or two (thanks to the Corpus of Historical American English database), and you see rather different usage of “community.” The word then seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part.

People wrote of “the community of my native city” and “the extensive community of Swallow Barn” and “the community of Friends in Barbadoes,” the lattermost referring to Quakers. “The citizens of Natchez are not a play-going community,” Jonathon Holt Ingraham wrote in a travelogue through the American South in 1835. “Philip Rochester stood well in the community,” Natalie Sumner Lincoln wrote in a 1920 novel. “A bad man is a plague spot in a community,” Professor Kenyon L. Butterfield wrote in a 1919 work on the future of farming.

In cases where “community” was meant more abstractly, it was often in reference to the political community in a democracy — a group not known to each other but bound together in a solemn and real way. “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 71 in 1788.

Fast forward to today, and in some arenas this style of usage persists. But it competes now with a great many “communities” that aren’t really communities at all. What they are, though, is culturally telling.

Place and shared experiences have fallen away from the modern understanding of “community.” When people speak of the “medical community” or the “venture capital community,” they’re really describing people with common interests and not common values, history or memory. Community in this sense is less about having one another’s back, more about lobbying for the same things.

It’s also about networking and deal-making, under the cover of a word that makes such endeavors sound less crass. Almost every conference these days tells its attendees that it’s not really a conference but a community. PopTech is a “community of innovators.” The Feast is a “community of brilliant innovators.” South by Southwest features “the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer.”

Sometimes the word is used in an almost Orwellian manner, to give the appearance of solidarity to a group of people who will ever be at each other’s throats: In addition to the European Community, an outstanding example is the “international community,” which in its inclusiveness is meaningless — and which is often invoked to support rival sides of a conflict.

But nowhere is the violence against “community” more punishing than in the business world. “Community,” it appears, has become a pleasant way of saying “customers who keep coming back and use their own time and online networks to hawk your brand, at minimal cost to you.”

To take stock of how far “community” has traveled, consider this primer from a Web site called the Community Roundtable:

“Communities matter because they help achieve many business goals more efficiently than transactional approaches.” Making customers a “community” can “extend marketing impact through advocacy,” the site argues, and “more effectively support customers through peer sharing.” Translation: You can spend less on advertising by getting customers to peddle your product to their friends; and you can spend less on customer service by nudging customers to troubleshoot for each other online.

This faux-organic, mercenary understanding of community infects every domain. Artists, authors and musicians are told that they need to build a “community” or “movement” around their work, not just make their sculpture, book or album. People will only trust your product, the logic goes, if you show them it’s not about the product but about the community you wish to build — even if you’re building the community just to sell the product by showing people that it’s really about loftier things.

These insights have given rise to one of the hotter new professions: the community manager. American companies are falling over themselves to hire them, because it takes a lot of skill at the top to make it look like things are swelling from the bottom.

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