Is digital community “real” community?
When social media became more real to me about 6 months ago I made cognitive sense of it best by thinking of it as a digital porch. The internet has empowered us to act like we would if we all lived geographically next door to each other and all had porches and used them like we did in the old days, or so I’ve herd. Community formed in a certain solid way when towns were small and garage doors were not used immediately upon arriving home, if at all, and interactions were high. More and more we’re geographically agnostic now and our architecture has changed to an almost wholesale elimination of the porch.
However, we now have what the porch came to symbolize expressed in a digital community where interactions are easy and come at an amazing rate. The critics have been loud and those who’ve embraced have been loud. So what is it that we have? Is it community?
A chunk of the Wikipedia page for community describes it this way as of today, “In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.”
Tonight, David Armano, after welcoming a family in need into his own home, invited his digital community to act like wiki says communities do. David’s digital community did. David’s intent was to help a family get an apartment. He believed it could be done if the resources were compiled. He chose to offer to his community a chance to play a part in it in action and their preference turned out to be to engage and give. In this current financial climate where need seems high and financial risks seem even higher David’s community choose to take a risk and meet needs.
It seems we have an alive and vibrant digital porch where communities can form and act like “real” communities. I am encouraged by the overwhelming support of over $9k in 4 hrs, thus far, to put a single Mom of three in an apartment. Fantastic. Read David’s original post here.