I thought and thought and thought about what I would want to use as the header image to this post. Communities… I was watching the game dev documentary on Netflix last night and when Richard Garriot’s segment came up, I remembered that glorious day so long ago when the Ultima Online community came together to assassinate his avatar, Lord British, on the day of that MMO’s opening.
Community — can’t live with them and can’t… um, can’t get fooled again.
Today’s prompt is from Kanter at MMO One Night a Week, who will ask:
Tell us about some community that you are part of and why it interests you or how it impacts you?
This is a tough question. A few prompts back, I thought I might be part of the SF reader community, but I don’t think that’s true. I read SF, but I don’t discuss it with anyone but my daughter.
I posted in Twitter last night, as I was thinking about this prompt, whether you were really in a community if nobody else knew you were in it? The whole purpose of a community is to connect with other people. Unless your name is Sybil, you can’t be a community by yourself.
That Sybil thing is gonna date me.
I’m going to start right off with the obvious — I’ve been part of a blogging community for over a decade now. Even when I wasn’t blogging, I knew I could talk with these people and share and they would be there. When I came back to Twitter (where it all started a long, long time ago) and blogging, there were some new people, and some other people were gone (some, sadly, gone forever), but there was a community and I was part of it still.
Without that community, I’d have missed out on so much. I met my boyfriend through this community 🙂 I got my current job from a referral from someone who read my blog back in the day. And most of this community, I have never met in real life. Some, I’ve talked to and gamed with.
But on my more depressing days, I feel that if I turned off the computer, my community would vanish with it.
Other communities — well, obviously, there’s the community in which I live in central Connecticut. My neighbors are aware of me, and I follow and respond to tweets from local town and community organizations. I use the library and try to shop locally. I can’t say the community affects me much, except that it’s the kind of town I always wanted to live in and that I moved back from California hoping to find.
It’s not the same as the community in Concord, New Hampshire, where I grew up. My parents both grew up there and knew everything and everybody. Mom could chat with the other Canadian Frenchies in French. Dad was a part of the classic automobile club, the bicycling club, a motorcycle club, Mensa for some reason, a Mason, and back during the Bicentennial he joined the Brothers of the Brush, a club where men didn’t shave for a month. Before that he was clean shaven. After that he had a mustache for the rest of his life.
During my parents’ funerals, people I never knew would come up, one by one, and talk about how my mother or father had deeply affected their lives, and shared stories I’d never heard. They were pillars of the communities and had so, so many friends. And the community was incredibly important to them.
I don’t feel like I can even make those kinds of connections with people. I love my family, but they’re my family, and I already lean on them a lot. They don’t have a choice.
I’ve tried joining communities, but I always feel like I’m still alone, just with more people. Eventually I always drop off and just head home and stay there instead.
So yay, electric friends. You’ve changed my life in ways real life friends never have. Thank you 🙂 Danke vielmals! どうもありがとうございます！
Communities don’t make us who we are, but they can certainly add to our lives and personalities. I’m very glad to be a part of a community with you, even if after time it has shifted and changed (and so have we). It’s also really nice to see you blogging again 😉
It’s really great to be back. It’s a great community and you are one of its the main leaders.
For your younger readers, replace Sybil with Jane from Doom Patrol. Only Sybil was (reportedly) a real person.
Tipa, I don’t think it is you, I think it is the times. These days people seem to go so far as boasting about how they don’t know any of their neighbors. EVERYBODY knew my parents, jeez. When I was a kid our house was like the local pub only without the cash register. There’d be 10, 15 people in our kitchen sometimes (ALWAYS the kitchen, my dad only used the living room for watching the Giants on Sunday). They were also always going to cocktail parties, or they’d go out fishing together, or group beach days. Always something social. When something bad happened to someone, the community would always come together to support them. Even if sometimes I heard my parents muttering un-kind things about the person, they still pitched in. It was just what you did.
These days, I don’t even know HOW you’d go about meeting someone. Everyone is so guarded and so suspicious of other people. And it SEEMS to me the younger they are, the more guarded they are, tho maybe that is just because I’m old so they seem me as more “Other” than they do people their own age. The people I do stop to briefly chat with when I’m walking around the apartment complex are always the older residents.
I gave up Twitter for a while because I think social media can be really damaging, but when I did I realized that now I was “talking” to no one other than my partner and that quickly started feeling really oppressive. As great as she is, we’re social creatures and we need more than 1 person to talk to, even if that talk is via 280 character tweets.
I guess I should’ve written my own blog post, but I hate looking for good header images so…. 🙂
I spend a ridiculous amount of time looking for header images. Especially since I stated using Feedly and saw that it never used the featured image, but it always took the first regular image in the post, so that means I had to find TWO header images.
I think part of it is definitely a change of the times. Back when we were kids, yadda yadda yadda, but now every stranger is a danger for kids.
The larger part — for me anyway — is that I know these communities exist. The running community, the bicycling community, music community — I know people in all of these, but I’m just afraid my dedication or lack of it would just make me feel worse in the end.
I’ve been reading all of these prompt posts, and it seems whenever a prompt touches on real life, it lets some unhappiness out. I think we all really need communities and miss the ones that our parents had.
I don’t miss those close, physical communities at all. I grew up in a village where everyone knew everyone else but it would be a real stretch to say many of them liked each other. It was more a question of who was in dispute with whom over what trivial infringement of property rights or behavior. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
What I like about communities is the familiarity of seeing people I know, local characters, things like that. That part is pleasant. I really don’t want to do more than pass the time of day with any of them, though. It does probably have something to do with the kind of places I’ve lived. I guess if I ever lived anywhere that had a preponderance of people with similar interests and tastes and attitudes to me, then I might feel more like getting closer to them, but that has literally never happened. I’ve always lived amongst people I suspect would have me tarred and feathered if I ever let my guard down.
I much prefer the online communities I move in and around. They seem to be both warmer and more welcoming and at the same time less demanding and difficult. Where that would leave us all in the event of a catastrophic solar flare event…
I just wrote to Nimgimli that I thought we were all looking for a community to which to belong, and your first sentence is how you don’t 🙁 I grew up in a French Canadian community (though not in Canada) where half the adults spoke mostly in French and occasional broken English. The community centered around the Church of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic church. Even though we weren’t Catholic (my mom was; her family refused to come to the wedding because she was marrying a Protestant) — even though we weren’t a member of that church, our lives still revolved around it, because everything happened there anyway. And because the entire community gathered in just one place, we knew everyone, and I did too. I had so many friends. That all changed when we moved back to New Hampshire. Without the crucible of living in a one church town, it was just trying to make friends in a school full of strangers.
Humans are social animals, and I’m thankful we have the internet now, at least, to find our communities.