Community Glues Offline and Online, Real and Virtual

Community is the glue that unities us all, as humans. It has for thousands of years. We identify ourselves with the physical communities in which we live - local, national and global. Our family is a community. Our circle of friends and fellow alumni are communities. The workplace is a community. Even Starbucks - the third place - is a community for thousands of web workers and new moms.

More recently, thanks to Web 2.0, search and mobile devices, community is becoming an equally huge part of our online lives. Technology has given rise to thousands of micro global villages where people find each other, talk and collaborate around shared interests and/or goals.

This isn't a new idea, of course. I remember spending hours on GEnie's RoundTables as a teenager in the mid-1980s. When the web blossomed in the late 1990s, many of us hung out on community sites like GeoCities and the late great Six Degrees.

Today this is all much easier and natural because of broadband. It has changed the way we view the web and the time we spend online. It's important to note the role that community has always played in driving the Internet revolution and how that will continue.

The aforementioned communities were the prehistoric predecessors to the water coolers where we spend time today. This includes the blogosphere (a giant, distributed community), social networks like Facebook and MySpace and virtual worlds like There.com and Second Life.

Community, however, is no longer limited to just the specialist sites. It's becoming completely ubiquitous online, just as it is off.

You can find it everywhere, really, if you look. USAToday.com, MLB.com, Edelman.com and even Apple.com all are, at least in part, communities. In the near future, every corporate-owned site will either have community features, showcase content from communities in a picture-in-picture approach, or simply point people to where they can find them.

This is just the beginning, however. The most exciting moments will come when online communities are increasingly used to foster offline connections. That's the big idea behind Meetup.com, for example, and why it's thriving. It's also why eBay Live and Gnomedex (and soon Techcrunch 20) are very successful events.

During the Paley Center summit I attended earlier this month in Silicon Valley, Vint Cerf talked about this at length. He was referring specifically to the power of video inside virtual worlds. He echoed many of the themes he covered in this recent piece in Forbes. Video is a hybrid between offline and on.

The lesson here for media, entrepreneurs, marketers and PR pros is that even though we are spending tons of time online, it does not replace what happens offline. In fact, it amplifies it. Last night during an event I participated in at Wharton School of Business, Ed Keller discussed his research into this phenomenon. More here (PDF)

The secret to success is gluing together online with offline and real and virutal. Use the web to make the physical connections we have stronger. That's one big reason why the words public relations are really finally beginning to have a literal meaning.

Comments

[James Corbett]

Steve the community aspect is something that was made extraordinarily clear to be in a most unusual way last over the weekend when watching a decade old episode of Start Trek: The Next Generation. Bear with me here! And forgive me for pasting liberally from my own blog post of yesterday but I think you'll find it's appropriate.

That episode of Star Trek: TNG was entitled "The Inner Light" and won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1993. According to Wikipedia: "The award was given at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Francisco. 'The Inner Light' was the first television program to be so honored since the original series Star Trek episode 'The City on the Edge of Forever' won in 1968.

An interesting point of trivia - in German-speaking countries the title of this episode is 'Das zweite Leben' ('The Second Life'). How prescient!

I hadn't see that episode in over a decade until I caught a repeat on Sunday. And I was just as moved then as I was when I originally saw it. In 'The Inner Light' Captain Picard's mind was possessed by a space probe launched 1,000 years previously from the dying planet Kataan by a people with nothing more to hope for than that they be remembered by somebody. Under control of the probe Picard lived a virtual lifetime as a family man among the doomed civilization. What was it about this action thin episode of the science fiction series that saw it widely acclaimed as one of the best ever? I would venture that it was the extraordinary insight it gave us into the human condition, and what we call society or community.

To digress for a moment let me state the obvious - emotional engagement makes us feel alive. It makes us feel worthy, a part of society. Whether it's to have our likeness painted on a canvas, to be quoted and linked to by another blogger or to know that our children will put our name on a gravestone, we need to know that we matter. Beneath 'Self-Actualization' in Maslow's hierarchy of needs are 'Esteem' and 'Love/Belonging' - the need to feel that our lives have meaning, that we've made a difference in this world, that we will be remembered. Like the people of the dying planet Kataan.

In the final scene of 'The Inner Light' Jean Luc Picard is given a flute which has been recovered from the space probe after releasing his consciousness back to his physical body. In a poignant moment he hugs the flute dearly to his chest, the musical instrument he had spent a virtual lifetime mastering. This was a gift from the people of Kataan who would now live on only in his memory. The flute was a simple wooden artifact, but the lifetime of memories and emotions it represented, or packaged, was priceless.

The irony was that Picard had spent his first five years on Kataan clinging stubbornly to his memories of life as a Starfleet Commander. Refusing to believe that the real was virtual. Now, back on Enterprise, as he played the haunting melody he had learned among a dying civilization it was clear the he was clinging on to a virtual life that was in many ways more complete than his true life, a life with children and loving wife among a settled COMMUNITY of ordinary people.

So, on an award winning episode of Star Treck which pre-dated "Second Life" by a date and was entitled "The Second Life" in German speaking countries, the punchline was a prescient question - was Picard's virtual life any less precious than his real one?

[Susan Bratton]

Steve,
My new favorite community is Twitter. I see your posts on there and enjoy what everyone is saying.
It's an insight into a personal community and keeps me going through out the day when I am working hard.
I am a podcast publisher, and I'd like to figure out more ways to make podcasting interactive.
For now, I just blog about my podcasts on www.dishymix.com and hope for comments! If you have any good ideas about making podcasting more interactive, I'd love to hear it.
Suz
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Susan Bratton
Founder and CEO
Personal Life Media, Inc.
Podcasts and Blogs for People on the Leading Edge of Culture

[nesh thompson]

Fantastic article Steve. I think online communities are already being used to foster offline connections, as barriers of time and geography are broken down and the stigma of using computers as a means of creating discourse this will happen more and more. Look at the relatively high proportion of people who now use internet dating. However, I think that there is a limit at this point as to how much online communities can expand and participate in real world relationship building as communication on the internet cannot (at least not now) take into account the fact that humans communicate not just by words but by body language, expression etc. The gamble we all make on the internet (online dating an excellent example here as well) is that we can't easily see each other.