Let's kill the sacred cow of "Community" and reveal the hidden commercialism
By Tom Foremski - October 19, 2005
Tuesday evening I was trying to find my way to a class room in South Hall, a building on the massive, meandering UC Berkeley campus where Quentin Hardy, a senior editor at Forbes is teaching a journalism class.
Quentin invited Dan Gillmor, John Shinal from Dow Jones' CBS MarketWatch, and myself a former mainstream journalist, to speak to his class about the new online media and how it affects our sense and understanding of self.
There were about 30 students and we chatted about a lot of things, and the word "community" kept cropping up, and up and up; not among the students, but from my fellow panelists.
It reminded me of my dislike for the term "community" because it is charged with an almost sacrosanct cultural meaning, to such an extent that it defies and discourages challenge. It is a revered word/term/concept and it is one that has become broadly appropriated by commercial interests, and deliberately so.
In the blogosphere and the larger mediasphere, community is used in ways that clouds meaning and cloaks commercial enterprise.
During a chat after class, Quentin noted that he heard the word community constantly at the recent Web 2.0 conference, where the $2800 per seat audience applauded "community" business models and services from the $30K per vendor pitches.
I think this sacred cow needs to be slain and we should not use highly charged words or terms unless we mean them to be used that way.
We should use more culture-neutral terms which don't engage society's sensitivities.
Here's my contribution to slaying the cow: I pointed out to the class that commercial interests love online communities, because they are an aggregated blob into which you can more cheaply throw marketing messages.
And let's not forget the "conversations" of the online communities, which are collected and diced and sliced and packaged and sorted and sold. By Technorati, Feedster, and a gazillion others--because it is all out in the open, in the commons.
Commercial interests are acceptable--after all, everyone has a landlord or banker that needs to eat--but cloaking commercial interests behind sacrosanct terms and ideas and concepts is beyond the bounds, imho.
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Comments (7)
> I think this sacred cow needs to be slain and ....
I am not sure if you have realized,but you are offending Hindus here for whom Cow is sacred god.
Posted: October 19, 2005 10:35 AM
No cows, metaphorical or otherwise, were harmed in the making of that post :-)
(thankyouthankyouthankyou)
Posted: October 19, 2005 6:21 PM
Community has always been a loaded word and many a politician has gotten it trouble with misuse of the term.
There's no denying commerical interests are involved in this, especially at the Web 2.0 level. However, I believe everyone needs to always keep in the back of their mind the core meaning of community.
Today's winners with the VCs were not the pioneers, others were there before and saw their communities go up in smoke because they tried to over-commercialize and the community resisted.
Those marketers and advertisers that want to play in this space better be smart and add value.
Myspace has a just created a standalone Scion community, why?- there are plenty of better populated alternatives. I am sure it was part of a media deal and made sense on paper.
If we slay the community cow, we might not have any communities anymore. The preciousness of the term, might just be the one thing that stops it from becoming the strip mall of the internet.
Posted: October 19, 2005 7:32 PM
I think you have the wrong cow, but one distinction that hasn't been made enough is between community and network. Communities have strong ties, a central cohesion that is relatively rare, and I think what isn't being described or valued here. Networks are composed of loose ties, more dynamic and are a power we have recently discovered.
Posted: October 19, 2005 10:41 PM
Ross, I think you are right about the distinction but community implies a central cohesion that is never present. I think that tribes is a better term in some contexts, because it more accurately describes the many self-interests of groups of people within communities.
Posted: October 20, 2005 3:15 AM
Edward, a "community" of small business owners is a strip mall, and yes, you are right, community does sound more pleasant than a "strip mall." :-)
BTW, you've touched upon an important point, users won't let companies montetize the heck out of them and not give value back in spades. It's the reverse ten-bagger, imho.
Posted: October 20, 2005 3:21 AM
Hey Tom -- I think that cow has already been slain, at least in the minds of media-savvy consumers. But I think you are talking about the less savvy -- so slay away. Doubt any company today would ressurect anything as transparently commercial as the "Pepsi Generation," but a few recent consumer campaigns come awfully close. I won't name them here, because I want their business.
Despite its flaws, the word "community" does seem to be more descriptive of how a certain kind of group interacts -- around shared interests? -- and some groups, commercial or not, behave more like communities rather than like tribes (identity based on type), mobs (power of the crowd), or my personal favorite, "gangs" (e.g., check out the some of the lurkers on sites like AlwaysOn). Let's just call them "groups" -- that's pretty neutral -- but be dead specific on what the group in question is all about.
Posted: October 22, 2005 10:19 AM