Evolving Our Perceptions of Community and Technology in the Age of Michaël

by Leslie Loy

This past July, on a warm afternoon, I found myself sitting in a circle on a grassy lawn in Sweden with twelve other people. Plucking grass stems at their bases and twisting them between my fingers, I listened as everyone collectively worked to better understand their definitions of community. One young woman from Germany remarked at one point to the group: “I don’t know if I consider something like Facebook to be a real community, because it doesn’t have a warmth to it, because it is disconnected from a reality I can grasp.” One of the other members of the circle, a new mother from Sweden, responded, “I disagree, because I actually have made deep connections with other people, and have been able to continue to meet my friends and share their lives.” The conversation twisted and turned just as the grass blades in my hand while my mind whirled. The conversation had, remarkably, evolved from one around “what is community in the twenty-first century?” to one that explored whether or not technology could create community, and how technology had actually created new definitions of community. These conversations were integral to my work with the anthroposophically-inspired organization, WeStrive (formerly NetworkM) and I found myself asking, How do we develop community in the twenty-first century if we don’t even all have the same definition of what a community is or how we access it?

In this day and age, we are no longer working with a dictionary definition of community. We are no longer able to concretely examine a body of people and say, “That is definitely a community” because we can rarely agree on what community is. This becomes problematic once one considers how often we use the word. A Google search brings up 1,360,000,000 references for the single word “community,” and its use ranges from scientific terms to social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. This enormous number testifies to the fact that we liberally apply the word “community,” with whatever looselydefined understanding we have of its meaning, to any and all seemingly appropriate bodies. But we have to stop and think. As with many things, we have to be conscious of how we use this word and to understand how its meaning has evolved. We are challenged with the task to consider what community is, to examine how others view community, and to better understand how our pictures match up—at a time when being conscious is the hardest task of all. In light of this challenge, we must understand not only what community is but also how we create it, and what its value is in our daily lives.

With social networking sites humming away on servers across the globe, we find ourselves connecting with people we’ve never met through newly evolving media. Through our similar interests in books (GoodReads.com), movies (IMDB.com), politics (MoveOn.org), and other hobbies and interests (Meet-up. com), we can create communities beyond the circle of friends we usually tend to connect with. Out of these broad social and specialized networks a new picture has arisen: evolving tools are empowering us to broaden our horizons or to deepen our interests, to reconnect, meet, and collaborate. These new technologies and our world’s increasing dependence on them highlight a very clear reality: some of us are more comfortable using these technologies than others. The discrepancy between those who rely on technology as a means to connect, whether with friends or colleagues, and those who shy away from it, is noticeable. Many would say that what divides those who use technology from those who do not is age, but my experience is that age is not the distinguishing factor that separates those who email, Skype, text, Tweet, and more from those who refrain. My grandmother, at the tender age of seventy-eight, learned how to email, thus my point that age is not the dividing factor here. I think the greatest reason why so many people avoid technology is fear, fear of the consequences of the technology and our unconscious use of it. Like our use of the word “community,” our fear of technology has the possibility of leading to great misconceptions, to gross misunderstandings of what technology is and how we engage with it. Like our conceptions around community, our relationship to the word “technology” highlights a lack of clear understanding of what technology is and how it appears in our lives. Technology is not just computers and cell phones, it is not just genetic engineering or great medical feats; technology is far simpler—it is knowledge. It is a tool or a means to address life, society, the environment, the sciences, and the arts.

The picture of both community and technology can be viewed as twofold. First, we have our perception of community as a body of people interacting with one another on a particular plane; it is an experience. Similarly, we view technology as a cold, disconnected tool that is being thrust upon us by others who are unconscious of the consequences of their creations. Secondly, we have somehow begun to assume that community is a macrocosm whereas technology is a microcosm. Our definition of community has ballooned to mean so many things—organisms coexisting, colleagues working, a group of individuals united through a common connection (a school, the grocery store, a study group, the neighborhood)—while the word “technology” has come to represent for us a specific kind of tool. In this picture, community sits on one end of a spectrum as an experience and technology on the other end as knowledge.

Social networking sites, as they are commonly referred to, are a shared crux in the context of this picture because they rely and are founded upon technology (working within the above definition) while purporting to build community, thus uniting experience and knowledge into the very same encounter. How can this be? How can these sites be building community, which requires warmth and nourishment (from the least conscious organisms—bacteria—to the most conscious—humans) through a seemingly cold, indifferent medium? It is the factor of consciousness that is, in fact, what allows these sites to be successful and what furthers these media to evolve, because people are, on some level, aware enough to recognize their need for community and to strive toward building it; localized, general communities are no longer enough. We now seek more niche-formed communities that are more easily accessed through technology.

People drawn together through community and technology, united by a common factor they then explore using a kind of knowledge that allows them to experience one another in new, and sometimes old, ways. This is the niche: where technology means everything from a pencil to a computer and community means everything from a grocery store to a nation. The times we live in call for a new understanding, for a recognition that we each work out of a different understanding, a different set of assumptions, of what is and is not community or technology.

My work with a community network that is committed to uniting people who are interested in taking initiative to create a new world relies upon evolving technologies—both those that involve computers and those that allow us to better communicate and share with others. What we share are often forms of knowledge, such as applied theories that inspire innovative thinking or social renewal. We live in times that require us to challenge our fears with courage; we can approach them with the knowledge that we are all human beings who have a greater task to meet in this life and the next. We can embody the Michaëlic spirit and strive forth into the world, and in our striving move beyond fears that resort to dictionary definitions of words and instead intuit our own sense of what these words represent in our lives, asking ourselves, “How am I demonstrating community? How am I interacting with technology consciously, so that it might contribute to the world in a healthy way?” This question is at the heart of my work, it is what underlies my questions around understanding and recognizing community. It inspires me to explore and to utilize, to the best of my ability, the tools that others have created out of their own communities to further our work together.

Community and technology in the twenty-first century, are partnered in an important way that challenges us to be conscious in our every gesture and to our utmost capacities; to act with an intention for conscious, collaborative striving. It is through this that new communities and new technologies will emerge. It is through this that we will truly be able to take our knowledge of the human being and infuse the world with our strength, which is lit by that great impulse of our times, the Michaëlic.

Leslie Loy is Executive Director of WeStrive; visit westrive.org.