Of Course This Is A Real Place
As George Carlin said so well, it’s ‘a place for my stuff’.
This blog is a place for just a fraction of the stuff in my head. I’m putting some of that here, and it is still here whenever I come by. It’s here whenever you come by, too, and not only can you visit anytime to see a bit of my stuff, you can find me here also, either by leaving a comment or emailing me at VeraBass AT gmail.
So to me this is a real place, although I do understand the common view that there’s really no here here. Jeffrey Deaver captured some of it entertainingly in his novel The Blue Nowhere. Here is my blog and it is as real as a little ’speakers’ corner’ or my tree or cave or den, as real to me as my room when I was a child, or my office today. Maybe it is the fantastical aspect that makes it seem not quite real to some of us. The fact that I can be in a dozen different places, in completely different company, and anywhere in the world, literally within moments, is fantastical. Conceptualizing an image of a hundred million people doing that at once is fantastical, and this is only the beginning.
All our online places are ‘real’. Amazon is a real place where we buy books and contribute reviews. Facebook is a real place and so is Second Life. Wikipedia is a real library of articles with real people building it.
Can any of the many real places we frequent here disappear overnight? Sure. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us because no one is going to tear town a place like Facebook while there are many and ever more inhabitants. By the same token, no on seems too surprised by the demise of Backfence, since it was increasingly empty. Uninhabited brick and mortar buildings in real cities and towns get torn down every day.
Sure there are differences between virtual places and physical ones. There are also differences between physical and intellectual labor, but they’re both real labor nonetheless.
This digression from the topic I’m currently musing on, community theory, is sparked by my reading an interesting exploratory post called 35 Perspectives On Social Networking by Malene Charlotte Larsen in Social Computing Magazine. It lists the 35 perspectives and then divides them into categories. What strikes me about this list, and the categories as well, is that they are all about the individual’s perspective, and about individual motivations and group agendas. Since the post is about social networking, the content is apt, however the lack of mention of community and contextual aspects makes me wonder about the extent to which we all envision social networking as an activity that is not associated with a, or any, real place. Actually, I left the post feeling that social networking had been somewhat disassociated from community.
In itself, the understanding of personal motivations and agendas is an important component of studying community behavior. I’ve recently read (if I could only remember where, I’d reference it) that the majority of work done on community theory to date studies only individual motivation combined with group behavior, and that there needs to be more work done from a wider perspective, in terms of social systems themselves, and in terms of their interdependence with one another and with their environments. I really wish I could re-find the author of these (paraphrased) words, especially since the implications appear so well matched to my own thinking.
Turn the view upside down for a moment. Every place that we have ever inhabited is related in our minds to what we did, thought, said and experienced there. This is as true of communal and public places as it is of our private spaces. People work online, play, network or make friends, even fall in love. Whether we do these things in virtual or physical spaces, those spaces are as real for us in a human sense as the things we do in them.
In order to fully understand our online communities and behaviors, I think we have to understand them within their context as well as from the personal perspective, just like in the physical world. We have much to gain from understanding the variety, scope, and value of the places we frequent, including those we have yet to build, from a community perspective.
A progression, perhaps, toward also considering Malene’s post on social networking contextually, is the interdependent aspect, the motivation people have to help one another and the group as a whole, and, ultimately, do things together. Social behavior is rarely an end unto itself. It also leads to community formation, growth, and strengthening, and thence to communal work, efforts, and projects, both for private profit and for the common good.
I see myself as doing these things in real places. Do you?
