Community

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1. A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.

2. The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.

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A community is a network of social and economic relationships and the places where those relationships interact.

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For much of the 20th century, if you asked someone to define “community,” they’d very likely give you an answer that involved a physical location. One’s community derived from one’s place—one’s literal place—in the world: one’s school, one’s neighborhood, one’s town. In the 21st century, though, that primary notion of “community” has changed. The word as used today tends to involve something at once farther from and more intimate than one’s home: one’s identity. “A body of people or things viewed collectively,” the Oxford English Dictionary sums it up. Community, in this sense, is not merely something that one fits into; it is also something one chooses for oneself, through a process of self-discovery. It is based on shared circumstances, certainly, but offers a transcendent kind of togetherness. It is active rather than passive. The LGBTQ community. The Latino community. The intelligence community. The journalism community.

For Bill Bishop, the author of The Big Sort:Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, that semantic shift speaks to a much broader transformation in American life. It speaks to the rise of the individual as a guiding force in culture; it speaks as well to the declining power of institutions to offer that guidance. As Bishop told a group at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic: “It used to be that people were born as part of a community, and had to find their place as individuals. Now people are born as individuals, and have to find their community.”

That change is on display, he said, in many facets of American culture, political and otherwise. Marriage, Bishop noted, is today commonly conceived less as a semi-self-sacrificial commitment—forsaking all others—and more as a means to deeper personal fulfillment. Journalism today is more and more commonly rendered in the first person, explicitly or implicitly, because the personal voice strikes many readers as more trustworthy than the institutional. In business, often, the willingness to break rules (“radical creativity”) is valued much more highly than the ability to fit in.

“I’m not saying any of these are good or bad,” Bishop noted. “It’s just a switch in how we’re living in the world.” And that switch is perhaps most obvious in electoral politics, which, Bishop argued, has become “less about issues now than it is about asserting one’s identity.”

You could also argue that the issues are entirely about identity, and vice versa. What’s clear, however, is that the notion of “identity” itself—the word skyrocketed in usage starting in the second half of the 20th century—is changing our understanding of “community.” What is also clear is that identity, as a concept, is becoming solidified in American culture.

That’s in part a response to our changing communications technologies, Bishop pointed out. For one thing, Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter and Snapchat and their many fellow services emphasizes identity through a combination of consumption and performance: On Facebook, for example, one’s favorite music and one’s favorite news sites and the memes and jokes one shares suggest, in the aggregate, not just what they like, but who they are. For another thing, social media services, as information-sharing platforms, elide the gatekeeping function that traditional media once played. Friends trump faceless organizations. Familiarity trumps expertise. The digital world has both allowed for and ratified a culture of extreme individualism. As far as information goes, as Bishop put it: “I get to decide what’s true or not.”

What will that situation mean for the country, as a collection not just of individuals, but also of communities? There’s reason, in one way, for pessimism. Alain Ehrenberg, in The Weariness of the Self, notes how psychologically exhausting it can be to be so constantly self-reliant. (As Bishop put it, “we’re not capable of doing that kind of self-construction every day.”) So identity construction, Ehrenberg argues, is at the root of things like depression, drug use, and even suicide. Defined that way, “identity” as a concept might, paradoxically, prove a challenge to American individuals.

And yet—here is the optimistic take—identity is also politically empowering. “Community,” in the transcendent sense of the word, is empowering. The culture of individualism Bishop argues for may bring Bowling Alone-style sacrifices of social capital in physical communities; it can also bring with it, however, a different kind of social capital: one in which the individual person, rather than the group, is primary. One in which the very thing the founders wanted for the country they envisioned—a people who were united not just by mutable circumstance, but also by shared values—is realized. “Community,” after all, the OED notes, is rooted in the Middle French communité. The word may have come to suggest a “body of people who live in the same place,” but, initially, it meant something much simpler and much more powerful: “joint ownership.”

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It’s about people.

First and foremost, community is not a place, a building, or an organization; nor is it an exchange of information over the Internet. Community is both a feeling and a set of relationships among people. People form and maintain communities to meet common needs.

Members of a community have a sense of trust, belonging, safety, and caring for each other. They have an individual and collective sense that they can, as part of that community, influence their environments and each other.

That treasured feeling of community comes from shared experiences and a sense of—not necessarily the actual experience of—shared history. As a result, people know who is and isn’t part of their community. This feeling is fundamental to human existence.

Neighborhoods, companies, schools, and places of faith are context and environments for these communities, but they are not communities themselves.

People live in multiple communities.

Since meeting common needs is the driving force behind the formation of communities, most people identify and participate in several of them, often based on neighborhood, nation, faith, politics, race or ethnicity, age, gender, hobby, or sexual orientation.

Most of us participate in multiple communities within a given day. The residential neighborhood remains especially important for single mothers, families living in poverty, and the elderly because their sense of community and relationships to people living near them are the basis for the support they need. But for many, community lies beyond. Technology and transportation have made community possible in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.

Communities are nested within each other.

Just like Russian Matryoshka dolls, communities often sit within other communities. For example, in a neighborhood—a community in and of itself—there may be ethnic or racial communities, communities based on people of different ages and with different needs, and communities based on common economic interests.

When a funder or evaluator looks at a neighborhood, they often struggle with its boundaries, as if streets can bind social relationships. Often they see a neighborhood as the community, when, in fact, many communities are likely to exist within it, and each likely extends well beyond the physical boundaries of the neighborhood.

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