I saw my first butterfly of the year Thursday evening and wanted to tell somebody. I knew of a good place to share my news, a place where everyone would immediately grasp its importance and celebrate with me. But I didn’t go there.I was in a quandary. A few months ago I withdrew from the online butterfly forum in which I had been active for several years. I was indignant about the treatment of a new member and decided that I no longer wanted to be a part of the group. “That’ll teach ’em,” I fumed. It didn’t teach them anything, because no one noticed my absence. Instead it taught me how unimportant to that community I had been.
Seeing the butterfly and having no one to tell brought to mind a conversation I had begun a week earlier with Michael Bugeja, author of Interpersonal Divide, about whether the communication devices we have come to rely on can have any positive role in fostering community involvement.
Bugeja, a journalism professor at Iowa State University, was in town for a national conference on community journalism. He takes a dim view of the way we have come to use cell phones and the Internet as substitutes for face-to-face connections.
I wanted to make the case that virtual online communities can bring together people with common interests across vast distances, redefining the concept of community. I wanted to point with pride to the virtual communities that have grown up organically through the Anniston Star Online: the Northeast Alabama News Forum, Creature Comforts, seasonal photo galleries and Score!
We were interrupted and didn’t get to finish our conversation, so I never learned what Bugeja thought of such efforts. As the conference progressed, however, I began to narrow my own concept of what constitutes a community.
Community comes from closeness. The virtual communities we host through the Star’s Web site are viable because there is a strong common thread that is not an intellectual interest, a political agenda, nor even the newspaper itself. Rather, it’s the people who read the newspaper and the place where they live. Community, it turns out, is about geography after all.
Not everyone at the conference agreed that cell phones and the Internet spell the end of traditional communities. There was, in fact, a great deal of discussion about how reporters can use these tools to improve their journalism by getting closer to the communities they cover. No one advocated dumping the tech. But we all came away with a renewed caution about letting the tech come between us and our communities.
This is true for journalists on the job, and it’s true for all of us in our personal lives as well. I think back with some regret about the loss of all those hours I spent in the butterfly forum seeking a sense of community I could have found with fellow hikers in the Little River Canyon Field School or in with other butterfly enthusiasts in a local garden club.
In a real community, not everyone will share your enthusiasm about a specific interest, but they will listen because they care about you. In the end, I didn’t have an online conversation about the butterfly I saw, what species it was and where it might have spent the winter. Instead, I told my husband. And you.
