How would someone define the word community? A community could be almost anything; as there are many definitions and uses for the term. “The word community is derived from the Latin communitas (meaning the same), which is in turn derived from communis, which means common, public, shared by all or many. Communis comes from a combination of the Latin prefix com, which means together and the word munis, which has to do with performing services” (Wikipedia). Many common definitions define community as a society linked by common interests, however the word “community” has evolved to include individuals with shared characteristics without regard to their location or degree of interaction.
Community was first introduced to society by German Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies through the term Gemeinschaft (usually translated as community). Gemeinschaft is an association in which individuals are oriented to the large association as much if not more than to their own self interest. Furthermore, individuals in Gemeinschaft are regulated by common beliefs about the appropriate behavior and responsibility of members of the association, to each other and to the association at large; associations marked by “unity of will” (Tönnies, 22). Tönnies saw the family as the most perfect expression of Gemeinschaft; however, he expected that Gemeinschaft could be based on shared place and shared belief as well as kinship, and he included globally dispersed religious communities as possible examples of Gemeinschaft.
The Encyclopedia Americana defines an ideal community as one that:
Emerges as an intellectual concept when social change threatens to destroy a locality’s isolation, traditionalism, and solidarity…. [This] leads to a newer form — including occupational and professional groups, neighborhood groups, and ethnic and political groups — becomes the functional equivalents of the older, ecological, isolated community, and they make it possible for their members to avoid the problems of a multidimensional mass society. Their members can find a focus for their social relations, loyalties, and interests.
While Howard Rheingold focused on consumer communities in his book, The Virtual Community, he could be describing any community when he talks about the “social glue that binds the WELL into something resembling a community” as 1) social network capital, 2) knowledge capital, and 3) communion. Social network capital is knowing there is a network to support you. Knowledge capital is the “on-line brain trust representing a highly varied accumulation of expertise.” Communion is making connections with people you may not have known without the community.
Together, these provide what Marc Smith calls ‘collective goods.’ “Every cooperative group of people exists in the face of a competitive world because that group of people recognizes there is something valuable that they can gain only by banding together. Looking for a group’s collective goods is a way of looking for the elements that bind isolated individuals into a community.” In that respect, the collective good makes the community compelling.
There is no doubt that the word community has evolved in relation to how people interact today. Like people though, times change and so do the ways we live and act towards one another. As long as people continue to change the way we live in our communities, the term “community” will also evolve.
Works Cited
“Community.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 09 June 2008. 05 June 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community>.
“Community.” The Encyclopedia Americana. 1998.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. 09 June 2008. <http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html>
Smith, Marc and Peter Kollock, Communities in Cyberspace. 1999. The University of California. 09 June 2008. <http://research.microsoft.com/~masmith/CinC_Introduction.htm>
Tönnies, Ferdinand (ed. Jose Harris). Community and Civil Society. London: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
