A Sense Of Community

Shawn P. Wilbur in his article ‘An Archaeology Of Cyberspaces’ defined community to seemingly refer to ‘relations of commonality between persons and objects, and only rather imprecisely to the site of such community.’ Rothaermel & Sugiyama pointed out that the term community was derived from the Latin root word communis. (2001: 298) Communis is formed by joining the words ‘cum: meaning together’ to ‘munus: meaning obligation, or (2) cum: meaning together and unus: meaning one.’ (Ibid)

They generalized that ‘thus, a community can be seen as a group in which individuals come together based on an obligation to one another or as a group in which individuals come together to be one in purpose.’ (Ibid)

German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, one of the earliest researchers on community, provided further scrutiny of the term and drew a line between society and community. (Rothaermel & Sugiyama, 2001: 298) He defined Gemeinschaft (community) as ‘intimate, private and exclusively living together’, in contrast with the term Gesellschaft (society) which was associated with the ‘public life’, the world itself. (Ibid)

David Bell characterizes Gemeinschaft as a ‘total community: as fully integrated vertically and horizontally, as stable and long-lasting, as comprised of a dense web of social interaction supported by commonality and mutuality, manifest in shared rituals and symbols – as a local social contract embedded in place and made durable by face-to-face interactions.’
(Bell, 2001: 93)

This total community is equivalent to the communities in small rural cities where, to borrow from the theme song of the 1980s sitcom Cheers, ‘everyone knows your name’. A sense of kinship and closeness is formed in these closely-knit communities, and tight bonds of friendship are fostered. This is in contrast with Gesellschaft which refers to ‘association or society’, and refers to city folks, where relationships are ‘shallow and instrumental’ because of the size of the city, and urbanization and capitalism compel everyone to move along. (Bell, 2001: 94) One such Gesellschaft community Bell brings up is the nation, which Benedict Anderson terms as an ‘imagined community’. (Bell, 2001: 95) This means that a sense of nationalism is fostered through the use of symbols, resources and devices. We will probably not meet most of the people in the community, but we are reminded of our belonging to a community by symbols such as the national flag, the national anthem, the pledge, to name a few. Bell asserts that these communities exist, because the members acknowledge their existence, and belief in them; and these are ‘maintained through shared cultural practices’. (Bell, 2001: 95)

It is important to note that these ‘shared cultural practices’ resurface in virtual communities and in on-line game cultures, as we shall see later.