Volume – 11 – Problem of community formation.. I think not.
Our modern world has resulted in an evacuation of meaning, a problem of community formation. This is what Grossberg is trying to say in his text. However, like Professor Strangelove stated in class, I too beleive that we are actually living in a world that involves an explosion of meaning, and with this an abundance of community.
I first came across this idea in a ‘Technology, World and Society’ class that I took in my third year. I remember the professor bringing up the idea that people believe that we are living in a world that no longer has an emphasis on community or on meaning. He gave a few examples of the number of people who vote is on the decline as well as relations with those in your neighbourhoods. Will Hunton, a writer for Common Dreams News Centre, wrote the following in an article titled “Death of the Community Spirit”:
‘Everyone in society now only seems to be concerned with their own achievements and ambitions,’ she declared. ‘We are in danger of creating a rootless generation… We have lost our collective compass and are paying a heavy price’
So there is obviously this idea of the death of community in our everyday society. I, on the other hand do not believe in this, I believe we have simply created new forms of community. My copy of the Oxford English Dictionary offers a number of definitions of ‘community’: a group of people living together in one place; the people of an area as a social group; a group of people with a common religion, race or profession; the holding of certain attitudes and interests in common.
Therefore community is something which occurs when we have common interests with other people or we lie within the same social group. Technology, espicially that of the Internet, has allowed people to reach out and form communities based on these interests in ways in which they could not do in the past. The priority of community has been moved away from that with people who live together in one place (i.e. a neighbourhood) simply because people now have the opportunity to be a part of a much bigger commuity into which they relate better. These communites are often much more fragmented in the past as well, ranging anywhere from the large community of Facebook to smaller niches such as booklovers or politics.
And politics is an interesting community in and of itself. My professor from third year argued that yes, voting rates may be lower then what they were in the past, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that political interest has fallen. Simply, in the past, your vote was all that you had. The parties had all the power. However, in todays society a persons vote doens’t hold the ultimate power and neither do the parties. Modern technology has allowed people to form communities on unique political topics that interest them and has for the most part allowed them to have an influence with their involvement within these communities themselves. Therefore the vote is no longer a persons only way to make a change, and political parties hold less perceived power then in the past.
