| by Peggy O’Mara, Editor and Publisher
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the first acceleration
occurred when the agrarian world
segued into the industrial world. the second and far more dramatic jump occurred when the industrial world transmuted into the digital world. While electricity and the telephone took some 50 years to reach 50 percent of american homes, e-mail and DVDs were adopted by most americans within a mere ten years. —luc de Brabandere, author of
The Forgotten Half of Change:
Achieving Greater Creativity Through Changes in Perception
Community is a popular buzzword. We hear about online communities and food communities. President Obama made community organizing a household word. We know that community is important, but what is it? How do we know when we have community?
Community literally means to be together with unity, to be one with unity. The form that community has taken, however, has evolved over time as we’ve moved from homogenous to more diverse societies.
Early definitions of community in Western Europe from the 1500s have to do with holding goods in common, and the first definition in the Oxford dictionary today includes “common ownership.”
Definitions from the 1700s were more secular; not only were communities organized around a religious faith, but also certain neighborhoods, districts, and countries qualified as communities.
We all have a sense of the communities we are part of—in the world, in our country, our local region, within our extended family, among our friends, in our immediate family, and finally with ourselves. In this age of high tech, community is more important than ever. While we connect with others online, being alone with our computer can be isolating and ultimately makes us crave the company of real people. In fact, high touch is the counterpoint to high tech.
I was listening to the radio game show Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! some time ago, and the question was asked, “What number came first, one or two?” The answer was surprising: two. The number two came before the number one. This must mean that as humans we perceived ourselves as part of a dyad before we perceived of ourselves as individuals.
Community then is an intrinsic need of human beings. We need other people. In community we have uninhibited communication, mutual understanding, and common valuing. In community we experience intimacy.
In the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, all communication took place within one community. Now we are part of many. To get a perspective on how things have changed: We are preceded in time
by 10 generations of industrialists, 100 generations of farmers, and 100,000 generations of hunter-gatherers. And in recent times, the pace of communication is accelerating.
According to Luc de Brabandere, author of The Forgotten Half of Change: Achieving Greater Creativity
Through Changes in Perception (Dearborn Trade, 2005), The first acceleration occurred when the agrarian world segued into the industrial world. The second and far more dramatic jump occurred when the industrial world transmuted into the digital world. While electricity and the telephone took some 50 years to reach 50 percent of American homes, e-mail and DVDs were adopted by most Americans within a mere ten years.
Another example of accelerated communication is the plight of the daily newspaper. In the last few years, the front page of the Ne w York Times has become old news before it’s printed. We’ve already heard the news on the Internet before we see the morning paper. Some of us are afraid of this new technology, afraid that things are moving too fast—but the word technology simply means tool. Like any tool, technology can be used or abused. The good news is that because this digital technology facilitates more rapid communication it also creates more community.
We see this on our website, Mothering.com, where we have 135,000 members of our discussion boards, 1 million total threads and 13 million total posts. In fact, our online discussion boards are the second largest parenting forums on the entire Web. There has been an explosion of moms’ groups in the last ten years. When I was a new mom there were only two groups: La Leche League (LLL) and International Childbirth Education Association. Now there are Holistic Moms Network, National Association of Mothers’ Centers, International Moms Club, Mocha Moms, Moms-Rising, Mothers Acting Up, the Mothers Movement Online, to name a few.
But before we consider reaching out to these or
other organizations, we want to strengthen the root of
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