The guest post at Tenured Radical linked to Kevin Levin, a Civil War scholar and blogger, talking about his own blogging quite a while back.
The mistake that people make is in thinking about social media as a way to build community. Some of you who have been around for a while know that not too long ago I was fixated with creating a Civil War Memory community. At one point or another I included Google Friend Connect and even a widget for the Civil War Memory Facebook page in the sidebar. Somehow I envisioned readers connecting with one another and continuing discussions in various online spaces. I now see this as completely misguided. There are no Online communities; in fact, it demeans the very concept of community.
In the end, social media affords the user the opportunity to build an AUDIENCE.
He gets excellent pushback from the commenters on this, and follows up:
I guess I would like to know what the difference is between a couple of people whining about my site and a community of interest or even a more robust notion of community. In the end I don’t see myself as fostering a community or taking part in one. Again, I see my readers as an audience, but an audience that I can interact with in different ways.
I find this really interesting—and admittedly, somewhat bizarre—in part because I started this blog not to get an audience, but to join a community. The blog was largely a home to give my comments elsewhere some context, to make me an identifiable and contactable character while I was out and about on the web. Readers are always conceived of as people who followed me “home” because I wrote a comment they found appealing—because that’s exactly how I read blogs.
For a counterpoint to Levin’s view, we can check out Ta-Nehisi Coates and a cute piece in The Economist. If you don’t read TNC, he’s known around the blogosphere for having good discussion in the comments, especially on tricky subjects like race. I don’t participate in the Open Threads over there, but if I remember correctly, the creation of the Open Threads, or at least doing them every day instead of intermittently, was a request from commenters to open a space to build community among people they enjoyed talking with. And they just held a meet-up, and are planning more.
The Economist piece focuses on unintended communities, with some nice quotations:
It’s somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.
I have an unposted draft that claims people want to join cults—Apple, aerobics, football fans, bullying, etc. That’s a bit too snarky. But forming a community strikes me as a natural tendency of most of the people I run into online these days.
5 February 2011 at 3:11 pm
I suppose a more thoughtful version of this post would have addressed the real question—what makes a community and how does one foster it?—rather than simply declaring there can be online communities. Oh well.
5 February 2011 at 3:33 pm
I am pretty sure my blog is not a member of any community. I am also quite sure that its audience is quite small. Its main purpose is to serve as an open journal for a very few people. Really it is just a series of open e-mails I am sharing with my parents and a few friends. I think this true of a lot of smaller blogs and mine is about as small as they get.
5 February 2011 at 3:55 pm
Bloggers who claim that there’s no such thing as online community amuse me, because I know they haven’t wandered beyond the mostly broadcast-style tools (which includes blogging platforms, facebook and twitter). Check out gaming guilds! Check out message boards! Check out fandom groups online! Check out crafting sites like Ravelry!
Having been into online activities since before the internet (we had Darpanet at my undergrad institution and we played cooperative games across a campus-wide LAN), I know there are a multiplicity of online communities. But to the man with a hammer (or a blog), everything looks like a nail (or a blog comment).
Sidenote: I love Civil War Memory, but it’s very much a broadcast-model blog, even though there are a core of commenters and followers who have some characteristics of a community.
5 February 2011 at 5:01 pm
What Janice said.
I don’t know Kevin Levin (aside from having retweeted a few particularly clever things he’s said), but other people I’ve known to complain about the lack of online community were basing their judgements on a sample size of one or two — ‘This one doesn’t work the way I want it to, therefore the principle is nonfunctioning.’
To both my delight and regret, social networking and online community depend vitally on certain skills (which vary by venue) — good writing, thick skin, tendency to over- or under-share, etc etc.
One of the most important ones (again, specifics depend on the setting) is a realistic understanding of what kind of control one can and cannot have. Letting things happen — like TNC’s open threads — can yield some unexpected joys, and the disappointment of one’s expectations need not spoil the day.
5 February 2011 at 6:12 pm
Dance, my reasons were the same as yours: a community and a platform. That’s why I responded so strongly to what Historiann was saying.
I am always kind of amused at those who, like Kevin Levin (as quoted above; I haven’t read his blog) extrapolate from their own experience to pontificate about what blogging does and does not do. N = 1 does not a data set make. On the other hand, I suppose that’s not so different from what you or I or the other bloggers do, except that we don’t declare such things as fact.
6 February 2011 at 12:09 am
I’m baffled by the idea that blogging ≠ community, because that’s exactly what I was doing when I started blogging, too – joining a community (I’d started reading a few blogs and I wanted to comment and it felt rude not to comment without having a home space of my own, and there you are. I chose pseudonymity purely because everyone I was reading was pseudonymous, so I thought it was part of the rules.)
The focus on “audience” seems to go back to the idea of blogging as a professional document – if you’re trying to find readers for your insights on a particular topic (Civil War, medieval history, how to get rick quick, whatever), sure, you want an audience. That’s very much the broadcast model Janice refers to. And I think that can be sort of inevitable if you’re about imparting information. But I think that’s a limited way to think about blogging (in the same way it’s a limited way to think about teaching). Blogging has never been about imparting information for me–it’s been about making connections with people.
I would say the degree of community found in blogging now has probably been diluted by Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and whatever – I don’t feel part of as closely-knit a community as I once did. It’s not that the community doesn’t exist, it’s just bigger and more diffuse. So maybe entering blogging now has an entirely different feel (though my sense is Levin’s been blogging there for a while?). But readers-as-audience *isn’t* inherent to the format–it’s just one approach. (As everyone else here has said.)
(Looking outside academic blogs, there are TONS of communities online. I’m part of various collector-fora that are ABSOLUTELY community-minded – I’m part of a Valentine’s Day swap in one that I have to get going on, in fact. I get really annoyed when people talk like something has to be face to face to “count” as “real” community.)
Ta-Nehesi Coates is a great example. (I LOVE the sentient tomato quote.)
But then, if you see your readers as “audience” and you don’t see yourself as “fostering community,” it’s not really surprising if your blog isn’t one.
Taking this in a slightly different direction, but thinking about blogging and my expectations for it as a community, I get really annoyed with people who write “blogs” but don’t EVER open comments. If there are no comments, it’s not a blog; it’s just a website with regularly-updated content. Whatever makes community, I think for a blog to exist, there must be comments.
6 February 2011 at 5:39 pm
Like Undine and New Kid are saying, I think what especially interests me here is the extent to which things perceived as designed to broadcast (eg, blogs, twitter) can create a loose distributed community with no single home location, existing in the spaces between and in the network created by linking. (Suddenly my tendency to index discussions makes more sense to me)
12 February 2011 at 6:05 am
Interesting post but I got stuck on this first sentence of the quotation by Kevin Levin “The mistake that people make is in thinking about social media as a way to build community.”
Why? Well, it’s the opposite of what’s just happened in Egypt…where social media helped people from all the country, from different strata of society to come together and function as a community to get rid of Mubarak.