When You Hear the Word Community - Opinions Requested

Started by Xanatos, May 16, 2014, 04:33:47 PM

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Xanatos

Greetings,

I am attempting to gather information for my personal uses concerning various questions. Below is the first question I would like to pose to you.

The only thing I ask is to keep your answer concise as possible. It will help me understand the answer better, especially if it is not a short single sentence or paragraph. If being concise is not easy for you, then do your best.


When you hear the word community, what do you think of?



To help put some context to it, if you need it, think -

Game Community
Internet Community
Comic Con Community (and the like)
Other

There is no wrong answer. I am attempting to gauge opinions and perspectives.

Shjade

Quote from: Xanatos on May 16, 2014, 04:33:47 PM
The only thing I ask is to keep your answer concise as possible. It will help me understand the answer better, especially if it is not a short single sentence or paragraph.

...so you want answers to be concise, but not too short?  ???
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Xanatos

Your reading into it too much. Not every answer can be one sentence or just a few words. Think of it in terms of roleplay. Quality/efficiency is what matters. Sometimes that means one or two sentences or one paragraph. Other time it means several paragraphs or even a full page. My goal was to get people's answers. Not an essay.

And holy crap I didn't realize it had been so long since I put up this thread. Damn, work really made the time pass.

Shjade

Mmkay then.

When I hear the word "community," I think of mob mentality. Not so much in the violent sense, but in the sense of opinions being shared and merged into a unified position more than actual opinion anymore. Community is the root of "everyone knows X" thinking, the way the Dark Souls community knows players who rely on magic are bad and backstab fishers are scrubs, or the way the Dota 2 community knows Russians are the worst pub players - even if these things aren't actually true, they've become accepted "facts" within that group. It's a body of people defined by their shared assumptions and values, in which one's first impression of any given member of that community within the context of that community should provide a fairly accurate sense of that group thematically, if not specifically.
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Conversation is more useful than conversion.

RedPhoenix

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TwoHundredTabs

To me, it has honestly just become another buzzword. It gets slapped onto, essentially, any group of people associated with a project - as if (A) labeling it a "community" means that the event/product provider actually cares about, listens to, and engages with its consumers or fans, or (B) the consumers/fans actually know and cooperatively interact with each other. Of course, those are both very often not the case.

Originally, I think the word had the meaning of "tight-knit group of people", and then "group of people who work together or actively interact with each other" - which would describe things like in-person cultural neighborhoods, websites for specific interests (e.g. specific fanfiction interests, modding forums for specific projects for specific games), or activist groups.

So, generally, the word evokes negative feelings from me, because I always suspect it of being used as another empty PR word.


If you're asking what I think composes a community, or what activities a community engages in - that's a different question, and it depends on how you're defining community re: the descriptions above.
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Cassandra LeMay

In the context of "gaming community", "internet community", and so on I am in the same boat as TwoHundredTabs. It's a buzzword. A real community, to me at least, is a group where emotional attachments exist not just between individual members of the group, but also to the whole group, i.e. to the "collective" made up of individuals and not just the individual components of the group. In so far certain people who have a certain interest in common fails to constitute a community, as long as the emotional context isn't there - and that, I would say, is the case in all the examples given in the opening post and all those along those lines. Those "buzzword communities" may well be made up of smaller "true communities", but do not constitute one themselves.
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Blythe

In the context of "gaming," "internet," and "ComicCon," the first thing that comes to mind is "hobby." Communities in this context are really just groups of people that share a common interest. However, if you broaden out the term with a peek at the dictionary definitions, I'd say that number 3 tends to sum up, at least for me, the definition that comes to my mind given the three keywords you mentioned, Xanatos, but I'd like to add that in the case of the internet, I'm usually hesitant to use the term unless there are bonds of friendship or other goodwill in such groups.

Drake Valentine

When I hear the word Community....

I Think of Something Like This?


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