Re-thinking community in the digital age?

Abstract

The study of community has a long and valued history across the disciplines which explore the social world and its meanings, yet dominant definitions of the term have altered with global and local transformations and the term has been used to describe a dizzying variety of social formations (Poplin, 1972). Community is constantly in transition, an extremely adaptive social force by and through which people continue to experience and in some ways shape the world around them. Yet whichever form community has taken, it has always developed as a set of practices which denote connectivity and solidarity with others. It is in community that local, traditional and natural social formations have been given precedence over rational and legalistic forms, reflecting the classical sociologist Tönnies’ (1887) famous characterisation of community as the local and non-contractual relations of Gemeinschaft existing in opposition to Gesellschaft - the larger social frameworks of nation, region and city put in place to order the social world following the ascendancy of the Enlightenment project in the West. In many ways classical sociology envisioned community as an alternative space separated from the bureaucratic and controlling forces of the state and heralding the possibility of a stateless society, a differently ordered world in which relations of trust and mutuality alone regulated social behaviours.