Re: RE: what is community?

From: Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad@ped.gu.se)
Date: Mon Mar 06 2000 - 08:52:13 PST


Community is, like soul, one of those words that are difficult to translate
well, at least this is my impression from what happens when people try to
talk and write about stuff like "community of practice", "community of
learners" or "virtual community" in Swedish. Myself I tend to slip into the
English and perform a lot of linguistic squirming over my hybridizations.

So I notice, as I write, that "community" for me is particularly tied to
the Xlists, cos here is where I mainly live in English -- my other
"communities" I just don't THINK of as "communities" :-)

There was quite a lot of discussion about community while you were away,
Diane. I think I made some kind of confession about having ridden along on
the "community wave" that hit the Xlists in the mid-90s, picking up
vocabulary as if starved for words on my desert island. The history of how
Xlist self-reference moved from highlighting the list as an "electronic
network" by way of some real confrontations over whether the Xlist
participants constitute a virtual community or not, around the time of the
switch from XLCHC to XMCA and into... whatever this place has been in the
XMCA era and will become -- this history is too long for going through
here. But for my own part, I'm less romantic about "online community" now
than I have been, which is what I tried to explain in the January thread
about Internet communitarianism. This in spite of the fact that if anyone
could string out a bunch of wonderful stories about getting to know people
on the Xlists and then later meeting them IRL, it's me. From the personal
perspective it has been immensely valuable -- my skepticism is more on
principles ;-) Also... if the STYLE of the XMCA -- the one us oldtimers
keep being nostalgic about -- is dependent on us contributors thinking of
it as a community, that's OK with me. I don't need an essential definition
for that, a boundary object is enough.

And if we're speaking about THIS place (tho I realize I was the one to
bring it back on the floor again) I don't think any homogeneous assumptions
about homogeneity have been among those traditions I'm being nostalgic
about -- perhaps an ubiquitous tho diverse assumption of diversity. Our
overlapping (but not very homogeneous) spectra of research interests should
be cognat-o-formity enough. And a certain mutual respect and appreciative
understanding of Other ideas. These are the ideals I've subscribed to with
the assistance of the weber gremlins.

So whether a homogeneous sexuality or gender pattern stereotypicality may
be requirements in some communities I am less sure that this is a general
trait of ALL communities. For me that depends on unsettled definitions and
unmade specifications of what kind of community we are talking about. And I
would LIKE to think of XMCA as a counter example, even while we are likely
to be as deaf and myopic to persons of difference here as we are elsewhere,
even as we try to hear and see.

With what would you replace community?

Eva



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