My Own Writing
A community is a group of unrelated people who know and care about each other.
Our sense of community often lessens as we age. In elementary school, it’s easy to form friendships with playmates and schoolmates. This continues through junior high school and high school, because there are still relatively small numbers of people in the same physical space with whom one interacts regularly. This begins to break down for many people in college, especially at large universities, which have many more people. This may have been mitigated by the recent widespread use of smartphones and social media. After one enters the world of work, community lessens further, as there is little time to socialize in most work environments.
In the suburbs, adults may have little sense of community and barely know their neighbors, but their children often do, because they are together five days a week at school.
The opposite of a sense of community is a sense of alienation and isolation.
One reason we don’t get to know our neighbors is that we know they or we will eventually move away. The lack of a sense of community may be greater in the U.S. than in other countries, because of the tendency of its citizens to move. A good test would be to ask how many people within a mile of of one’s home one can name.
I believe that many people crave meaningful contact with others but because of the constant bombardment of stories of crime and brutality from the news media, we erect barriers around ourselves. Communication networks break down those barriers.
A friend once confided in me regretfully, “I feel like I don’t belong here. I want to go home but I don’t know where home is. I want to go back to a place where everyone knows everyone and each person is needed, like on a farm.”
Some of the most popular TV shows portray a small community: Cheers (where everybody knows your name), M*A*S*H (surgeons and nurses in a wartime hospital camp), Friends, All Creatures Great and Small, etc.
As civilization develops, each of us depends on it more and more, yet it depends on any one of us less and less.
In civilized society, we eat food we didn’t grow, wear clothes we didn’t make, and live in houses we didn’t build. To pay for them, many of us work at jobs we don’t really like.
In these days, many people are struggling to reconcile their primal nature–especially their need for community and meaning–with the alienation and meaninglessness of much of modern civilized society.
Alienation began with agriculture, which led to food surplus, division of labor, and the rise of cities and civilization. For the first time, we began to be surrounded by strangers. To this day, there is a huge cultural difference between those who live in small villages and those who live in cities.
Examples of Communities
- Fraternities
- Sororities
- Sports fans
- Latinos
- Fundamentalist Christians
From Wikipedia on 11/1/12
The term community has two distinct commutive meanings: 1) Community usually refers to a social unit larger than a small village that shares common values. The term can also refer to the national community or international community, and, 2) in biology, a community is a group of interacting living organisms sharing a populated environment. A community is a group or society, helping each other.
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.
Since the advent of the Internet, the concept of community has less geographical limitation, as people can now gather virtually in an online community and share common interests regardless of physical location. Prior to the internet, virtual communities (like social or academic organizations) were far more limited by the constraints of available communication and transportation technologies.
The word “community” is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, “with/together” + munus, “gift”), a broad term for fellowship or organized society. Some examples of community service are to help in church, tutoring, hospitals, etc.
Book Excerpts
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Books
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. By Robert D. Putnam. 2000.
Useful Links
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