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First Words

What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?

Credit...Photo illustration by Derek Brahney

You can tell a lot about the cultural status of capitalism by how we refer to people who buy stuff. “Customer,” with its implicit deference — its suggestion that the buyer is always right — is now a relic of a bygone era. “Client” is formal and reserved for professional relationships. “Consumer,” with its air of piggish, Pac-Man voracity, is the slightly dehumanizing moniker most of us grew up with, but that was some time ago, before the rise of the brand as a cultic family. Now everyone who buys or uses or even just cares about a product or service has been collectively upgraded to something more ephemeral, almost spiritual, a loose association of souls brought together in one churchlike congregation: a “community.”

Imagining such groups as little virtual villages is an old tech cliché, an echo from the days when the agglomerations of people on the internet were smaller, more like-minded and manageable. It’s still how Facebook describes its more than two billion users, stretching the notion of “community” thin enough to cover over a quarter of the earth’s population. This is the scale of the demographic Mark Zuckerberg has now spent so much time reminding us — and, over two days of testimony in Washington, our congressional representatives — that he feels very, very sorry to have disappointed. As he told Recode last month, he is sorry that the company “let the community down.”

“Community” is derived from the Anglo-Norman and Middle French communité, meaning, primarily, “joint ownership.” A community, at least in theory, is a site of collective decision-making; it is maintained by the people who built it, for their own benefit. It monitors itself and invests in its own health. It rewards participation with a real stake in the common good. It’s no wonder, then, that community tends to strike us as a positive thing; the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams once wrote that the word’s most salient attribute was that it “seems never to be used unfavorably.”

There’s an association that still lingers between a “community” and a physical location — the idyllic small town, say, or the utopian village, real or imagined. It evokes a cozy, friendly, simple place in which people live in easy harmony and cooperation, each with a role to play, each mattering to the whole.

But the countless, ever-multiplying communities of today are something different: not collections of humans functioning in unison but random assortments of people who do the same things, like the same things, hate the same things or believe the same things. Life online is absolutely full of communities. There are fan communities, hobbyist communities, communities for users or enthusiasts of every consumer product imaginable. Every interest, every circumstance and point of identification, it seems, benefits by gathering under this feel-good umbrella word, which instantly puts a friendly gloss on every activity. People who interact are a community. People who don’t interact but share some quality or belief become a community. People who are lumped into communities by other communities are communities. “Community” makes everything sound better. It makes “the activist community” sound approachable; it makes “the skin-care community” sound important; it makes “the Christian community” sound inclusive and kind; it makes “the medical community” sound folksy and skilled at the bedside; it makes “the homeless community” sound voluntary; it makes “the gun rights community” sound humanistic; it makes “the tech community” sound like good citizens.

The tech community, of course, is partly responsible for this explosion. Platforms like Facebook, which exist for the express purpose of “creating community,” turn out to be in the business of exploiting the communities they’ve created for the benefit of those outside (the business community, the strategic communications community, the Moldovan hacker community). They invite members to “participate,” but not, in the end, to make decisions together; the largest rewards, and the greatest powers, stay private. The company lays claim to everything of value that can be extracted from the assembled group. Nobody feels any personal kinship with a “community” of billions of fellow Facebook users; only people who work for Facebook would ever describe things this way. But this communal language maintains the illusion that we’re all in this together, working for something that will benefit us all — neatly keeping the focus on the things being “liked” and “shared,” rather than the ones being mined or sold.

The psychologists David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis outlined four basic elements of community in a 1986 article titled “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory.” There was membership, or “the feeling of belonging”; influence, or the “sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group”; reinforcement, or “the feeling that members’ needs will be met”; and shared emotional connection, or the “belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together and similar experiences.”

McMillan and Chavis also cited an important distinction between two types of community that have long coexisted. One is geographical — neighborhood, town, city — and the other is “relational,” concerned with the interconnections among people. Our sense of community seems to shift steadily among these very different modes of thinking. Over the decades, its meaning has lost the precision of city limits and has expanded to accommodate groups with shared values, planned and intentional organizations and a general sense of interpersonal connectedness. In 2018, it feels as if community is about being recognized as a certain kind of person — when it’s not merely about fitting into a broad category. In other words, our sense of community is less and less about being from someplace and more about being like someone.

This is certainly how it works in politics, where “community” magically converts huge groups of people — what we’d maybe once have called a constituency — into neat, undifferentiated units. Community is the spoonful of sugar that makes the othering go down. A politician might gingerly refer to “the black community,” which sounds more validating and supportive than simply saying “black people.” A “community,” it’s implied, is vibrant and productive and self-sustaining. It doesn’t need others outside it to defend its rights or protect its interests. Adweek once suggested that “the female community is finding and establishing itself among the ranks of the techies in the Big Apple.” The “female community,” of course, implies that disenfranchisement is just another ladies’ choice.

Nobody belongs to just one community, which is part of how communities exert their influence on us: We are different people inside different ones. Our roles and identities shift from one to the next, in large part because the spaces ask different things of us — sometimes under duress. Community can do powerful things to us, as anyone who has ever felt trapped in a small town or dissented from a religious group knows pretty well. A community can liberate or encourage conformity; it can include or keep people out.

In the utopian-village sense of a “community,” it’s other human beings who accomplish this, exerting all their different social pressures over us to make us behave a certain way. This is a dynamic we can understand, and accept. Raymond Williams’s observation — that “community” seems never to be used unfavorably — still rings true. We imagine community as a cocreated project in which everything can be negotiated, in which everyone has a stake, in which democracy can flourish. The only things that can’t be negotiated are the laws of nature, the floods and droughts and cataclysms and acts of God no village can avoid.

The digital platforms where we fall into all our different groups make us a similar offer, presenting the communities they host as rich, human-built spaces where we can gather, matter, have a voice and feel supported. But their promise of community masks a whole other layer of control — an organizing, siphoning, coercive force with its own private purposes. This is what seems to have been sinking in, for more of us, over the past months, as attention turns toward these platforms and sentiment turns against them. When you’re on Facebook, Facebook is the laws of nature, the force that creates its own ecosystem and determines its workings. It gets to send floods, bring droughts, strike down users and strip-mine their information, decide which community is targeted with what. It can build tools to censor the content a nation like China might wish to censor, and systems that suppress — or fail to suppress — content stoking ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. These powers aren’t jointly held; they’re entirely private. They eat away at the very thing that makes community worthwhile, until they’ve created something that’s not a community at all, but a simulation of one, a game with one winner and a community of losers.

Carina Chocano is the author of “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was a First Words column about what it means to be “entitled.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 9 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Group Think. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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