Communal Mud

This eJournal entry feels important. No its not my one year anniversary of my first entry. I’ve actually started up an email list attached to my eJournal. I’ve even had a few takers! Wheee!!

Okay. Here are several things to get me started:

• I stayed late at work not on paid time, but we had a carry in dinner, and I wasn’t scheduled as late as I usually am so I stayed later to eat and chat with those around at work.
• One of my kitties is sitting on my desk, leaning forward to cuddle every time my hand wanders near the trackball/him. (His brother on the other hand is out on a Safari outside probably hunting something, but I digress)
• I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Mian Carvin’s fight concerning visitation rights for her child that she raised with her lesbian partner although she is not the biological mother.
• I’ve been remulling my criticisms of suburbia (1|2|3)
• I’m also considering the cluetrain manifesto and their thesis that markets are conversations
• I’ve been listening to Tick, Tick… Boom! (Amazon|iTMS) Jonathan Larson’s hour musical about life after 30 in NYC and his experience in theatre
• Discussions that go on about Apple computers on lists and weblogs
• My recent and spontaneous desire to vacation/move to San Francisco

So now you have a glimpse of the muddy thoughts that I’m working through at the moment. These are all linked in an over stretched concept map to community and the desire for community and companionship.

I once had a teacher in high school ask me why my generation was so depressive and negative. I didn’t quite have an answer for her then; I might have one now.

Our communities, our need for communities , and the ability to have conversations within those communities has been horribly overlooked. Over the past 100 years or so we’ve moved from a societal structure where you were only interdependent on the people within your local community to today where we’ve come to a point where our webs of interdependence are extremely wide. The actions of some electrical grid operators in Ohio blacked out NYC. Nineteen people can ground every airplane and wreck havoc throughout the country. But while we’ve become infra-structurally independent we’ve also replaced our communal activities with individual activities. We’ve replaced theatre and movies with television that we watch alone, and DVD’s that get consumed individually. Our conversations about one local newspaper have been replaced by everyone consuming an increasingly large multitude of growing news sources, but having fewer and fewer people with whom to discuss topics. We’ve beaten community down so far that we now we need a website to build a book based community.

Random Aside: I think this is one of the reasons why Howard Dean’s campaign has caught so much momentum, he’s focused on building community.

I’ve gotten lost a little bit in my thoughts, I’m just attempting to weave too many threads together. Like a good procrastinating college student I started reading web pages. I came across the key paragraph on a rant on working for AOL:

AOL is about centralization and control of content. Everything that is good about the Internet, everything that differentiates it from television, is about empowerment of the individual.

In addition because the Internet individually empowers individuals it also empowers groups of individuals, but at a level where we’re still individuals and not demographics.

The promise of the Internet is not that it brings us into the future, it empowers us to return to our tribal roots, organizing around common interests and beliefs, and helping each other.

Additionally, the ever present chasm that must be navigated though is self empowerment of the individual at the expense of the community. I firmly believe we have to carefully balance our needs versus the needs of our community. There has been an unfortunate rise in people valuing their needs above all others, and as such as caused unfortunate social conditions such as divorce, poor child raising, and a decrease in meaningful civic activity.

We are sinking, seeking community but we’re often too self-centered to truly devote ourselves to community.