Category: Community

I began talking about this topic in The challenge of community, and here I want to return to the idea of how community has changed over recent times.

Some of these ideas arose in considering Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” – how society was more closely knit and qualities of character had consequences for yourself and those around you, how behaviour and personality were noticed and affected your life. Also how economic activity and your place in nature were clearer, as trade was more locally evident and transport more closely related to environment.

Then how our immediate realities seem to be becoming increasingly irrelevant as we travel further and use methods more removed from reality; consume culture online or in isolation; and so much of life has become quite virtual and interlaced with the use of technology. The relationships between self and environment seem less apparent, more avoidable, as we can tune out from so much or manage it remotely.

Focusing on social aspects, it seems we sometimes prioritise communication and validation from virtual connections over those in proximity to us. Possibly disregarding uncomfortable realities and going where someone will approve and empower us. We seem to drift towards those who agree, where before we ‘had’ to work through our relationships with those who were there. I imagine that made for very different social realities.

Where is the learning now, where is the shared meaning and construction of reality? Or are we all wandering around isolated and unchallenged, not pushing through with difficulties in understanding or relating? Choosing our own perspective.

Looking back at the recent festive season, it seemed there was a lot of ‘living in the hype’ of cultural traditions (heart-warming movies and songs, idealised images of society and family life etc.) but then almost a hatred and intolerance of the realities of sharing time and space with others. As if we want the illusion, the mask of that community without quite being able to create it.

Touching back on Jane Austen, that sense of personal qualities and character mattering – how people managed relationships and carried themselves within their communities. Now it seems we can avoid many of those challenges and disregard the social reflections of our environment, creating our own little worlds.

It seems community reflects reality in a way: social identity used to be shaped by the relationships of community; meanings and truths about human activity and our place in nature were evident in how we lived. Now, maybe community reflects our disengagement and distraction from those realities – what would it take for us to focus our energies on developing community once again?

It’s interesting to me how something that was once so tangible and influential has become something quite different. How the place of the individual in environment and social context has changed so much, and how we can find new ways of working with these realities.

Lately I’ve noticed various articles decrying the loss of community, be that the difficulties encountered by local businesses or the stripping away of local support systems and interconnections. It seems in many ways the traditional functions of community and local relationships are fading and being commodified into services or products. That may be slightly cynical, but it does seem distrust and the perceived security of the client relationship are replacing natural cooperation between people.

When I think about what community used to be, it seems it was a fairly static collection of people with a network of established relationships that people maintained and understood. It seems there was a hierarchy of sorts and also social convention that shaped interactions, creating trust. Much of life seemed mediated through community – celebration, the passing of time, social meaning, the processes of change.

Modern life seems to have stripped much of that back through social mobility, rising populations, remote and abstract economic activity, the changing structures of family and other social relationships, and the growth of technology. Much of the limitations and hierarchy seems to have gone, creating a slightly unnerving level of freedom but also the conditions for greater equality.

In our predominantly economic reality, it seems many of the old functions are re-emerging as business opportunities offering lifestyle, entertainment, maintenance, care, or security as services where I imagine much of that used to exist within the parameters of household, neighbourhood and community life. Even modern services such as counselling seem to replace natural social relationships and meaning, for example through the stability and honesty of social life.

Overall the sense of community seems to have drifted into a more isolated, transactional, problem-solving approach to modern life. Maybe it’s the lack of time, or the application of economic principles that outsource certain functions for efficiency, I’m not sure. But in essence it seems that human connections are disappearing and being replaced by economic ones.

Of course it’s harder to trust when community is now a large, changeable mix of people and social conventions are breaking down or undefined. And there are natural challenges to communication when so many aspects of life have changed so completely – that takes time, and time is something we don’t have in many ways.

As with everything, I’m not aiming to criticise so much as delineate what seems to be happening. Hopefully we can engage with these processes and begin to more consciously create and maintain these structures, rather than looking on local community as simply something that adds value to our real estate and quality of life. We are still groups of people living in places, and it would be nice if that human reality could be revived.