Reflections on Creating Community Online
- Reflections on Creating Community Online
There’s an interesting conversation about the difficulty of creating community online at adam Tinworth’s blog, and what the word means. The article is about “Why Media Gets Community Wrong”. Adam is in a good position to comment, since he is responsible for a number of blogs on behalf of Reed Business Information.
This bears on the continuing conversation about campaigning coalitions of bloggers at Liberal Conspiracy, here and also elsewhere.
Adam comments about one of the possible reasons why some people in the media don’t “get” blogging:
Most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.
What is online community?
In a discussion about the use of online forums, Adam concludes:
Here’s what I believe:
Community is not a place. Community is an approach to publishing.
I disagree on this point. The phrase “Approach to Publishing” makes me think of systems, procedures and philosophies; these are all too mechanistic. Community is none of these things - it is a set of relationships between people who have something in common. It gets interesting when communities decide to do things together - all sorts of things happen, and each group develops it’s own “natural” dynamics that affect or even control where the founders or leaders can take it.
I do agree with him on the need to interact continually with blog readers, though:
To really, genuinely engage with your readers you have to embed it in everything you publish to some degree.
I think that blogging is a network strategy, not a community one. The difference is that networks are more ephemeral than communities. The latter become settled relationships. For all the interaction around blogs, it takes more than a couple of comments to create a relationship.
Comments can create acquaintances, or even allies; but to create community requires much more to be held in common - which may develop over a longer term, through common aims, or through shared membership of a political party or other body.
Further, communities can develop around a blog, but that is not because of the act of reading - rather it is because a consistent group of readers have got to know each other over a period of time.
You can read Adam’s article in full here, with a good comment thread.
It is their community, not yours
The single most important point about an online community is that it belongs to the members of the community, not to the owner of the website. This is counterintuitive for some, but the members - as a whole - invest many times the amount of time in the group than does the host.
I’ll wrap-up with part of a comment I made on the article linked above:
You can provide a meeting place and be the host; you can be affable and friendly and make people feel at home; you can attempt to guide the agenda by providing expertise, advice and services; you can attempt to identify the values and focus of the group of people; you can be the “warden” and the “janitor”.
Community is a set of human relationships between a set of people. Community will happen when a number of people come to your “hearth” (to borrow a Viking concept) and begin to build relationships with each other. The most important point is that it belongs to “them” not to you - even on your server.
And two web references for further reading:
I’m not sure I agree.
The point that I think you’re getting at is that blogging is a medium and not the message; that much, I agree with. However, a blog can be used to deliver a given message in a number of ways. For instance, Donal Blaney uses his blog (donalblaney.blogspot.com) for polemics and so on, while something like The F Word (thefword.co.uk) is much more of a community while something like Liberal Conspiracy is a group blog with a rather more diverse audience.
In essence, ‘blog’ is too broad a term and we need to move down a level in our analysis to effectively understand how blogs are used to communicate (sometimes in a unidirectional manner) and to create communities. I would add that communities often form by accident rather than by design.
xD.
Dave Coles last blog post..Off on my travels
You might find this post helpful in understanding my thinking:
Community or Network?
I have two threads of thinking running (”Creating Community Online” and “Ten Out of Eight Cats - Blog Campaigns”) and that post fitted better into the other one. I’m trying to keep Ten Out of Eight Cats focused on the issue around Blog Nation vs wider coalitions.
The key point that I’m exploring wrt to the Blog Nation, is - I suppose - whether the formation of a community of bloggers from one “area” of the blogosphere (note: different from a community around one blog) will inhibit the formation of wider networks when necessary.
In essence blogs as such are imho too ephemeral to build long term alliances and coalitions on their own; they are better at building “networks” (e.g., Usmanov, Iraqi Translators).
The essence of a community is to allow people to “know and be known” - if you like broadband communication between human beings (blogs being more narrowband - e.g., in an extreme example you would not decide to marry someone simply from the knowledge of them from their blog).
I’d argue that the FWord has developed a community around the blog (as has Pickled Politics, as may Liberal Conspiracy).
Con Home is an interesting example - there is a community around the blog (contributors + regular commenters), and it also provides “plumbing” facilitating a new dimension to an existing community (Conservative Party) that previously only came together vicariously at conference.
>I would add that communities often form by accident rather than by design.
One of my favourite “summary quotes” in this area is “communities form where networks intersect”.