The title says it all. To add on to that: Community sites are tools for communities not the other way around. These are probably the biggest misconceptions I face when discussing social media, and community building. The later the paradox in itself as the community is formed by the community not by persons. A community is a collection of individuals, that can be guided by individuals but only with the consent of the community.
You can trigger community by pushing it along but you as a person, company cannot per se build it. Yeah I know it is a pretty bad deal. :-) “Igniting†an unstable community usually creates a really poor community if any, and most likely chaos will appear. This chaos can be pretty unpredictable and the community takes all possible twists and turns.
For instance look at dictatorships, even though they might not be considered as true communities as they are artificially created. What happens when the control over these are lost? Look at what happened to Balkan, the former Soviet Union and other examples throughout the world. The moment the stronghold dictators started to erode the community exploded. However in the vacuum of leadership and any kind of structure (which should not be mistaken for strict hierarchies) the chaos began, bad elements took the opportunity and it is only now when we see something good is happening.
I wrote 2005 a piece based on the blog “The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy†by Clay Shirky. I will take a quote from the blog to exemplify:
“Someone built the [social software] system, they assumed certain user behaviours. The users came on and exhibited different behaviours. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled…. As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.â€
Even for the artificially created communities you will see this. The group accepts the boundaries, it forms from it but however tries to change and push them. (Some very funky, funny yet graspable analogies can be made with the entropy concept in chemistry and physics, but I will leave those out.) The change of the boundaries is the tricky part here. The community is constantly evolving, and is very fluid in its nature. Try to control it and you will most likely create a chain of reactions that you didn’t have the slightest clue could happen.
Maybe the best analogy here is to consider the power of the ocean. You can as a sailor only embrace the power of the ocean. You can sail the ocean but you can never control it. The sea is in command and you can but only just adapt to it. Still you will be able to take out a bearing and after you have accepted the power of the ocean you will be able to navigate over the ocean. Not always is the straight course the best way to go here. :-)
What can we learn from this?
A community site is driven by the community but the actual site is but yet only a way for the community to express itself. For the social media company, the site becomes what the ship is for the sailor/captain. A tool and only a tool. The ship can only be prepared for the ocean. Do not in your wildest imagine try to shape the ocean after the ship you built or the community after the site for that matter.
Remember that communities are built up by the dinner conversations. The disagreements The agreements. The issues. All emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, apathy. Every emotion out there. This is what the true citizen media should be about. It is the personal accounts. It is the mosaic of personal views. It is the emotional content. It is the view into the life of people, but not in the silly reality shows we see on TV but real life. It is the instant capture of emotions. The capture of the personal views in context is the key. Technology have now made it possible to capture this in real time and organize it. That is what is so cool.
For instance. I got an email as part of an email group by a person. (I will not go into the content of the email as it is not important. Basically it was a personal account of friend disappointed in one of his friends. Also I will not go into whether he should or shouldn’t have sent it as I do not think it is important and not a matter for me comment on.) Nevertheless I was struck by the personal nature of the note as so was I struck by the discussion that followed. The amazing part is that he by that email created a sub-community around that email which spread out throughout the relevant resources online. He for a brief moment of time built a content-based community around that particular topic or an event. The cool thing is that this can be replicated over and over again… I will soon tell you how.
These are the conversations and personal reflections that are completely lost in traditional media which still struggles to adapt to the new distributions channels we have at hand not to mention the mechanisms to cover events around the world. The moment they have bubbled up into the news story they have been filtered by a selected set of eyes (often too influenced by their biasses and backgrounds as so am I) and too often the context is totally lost.
