A community is more than just a one-time marketing campaign. It’s more than Twitter followers and Facebook fans; it’s a place for members to talk to each other and it can sustain itself. It can help you throughout the life of your company if you take the time to grow it correctly.Here are six steps to get started: Know your audience. What does your community care about? How do they communicate? Where do they hang out? Who are the influencers and engagers? If you’re building a community around a specific product, who is already talking about it? To find the answers, ask questions! Engage with your audience to determine what they want, need and desire. via How to Build an Online Community | Cisionblog.

I feel sad, thinking that some people really belief that this kind of affiliation, cultivated for commercial reasons, is what community means. It makes me feel a little tawdry, too, for having talked and written about “building community” at conferences, and I just hope I didn’t make it sound so calculated.

De Botton’s book is really about the search for community, the loss of which he ascribes to the decline of religion. His premise is that we need to create secular rituals and social structures that will do us good in the ways that religious rituals and structures do, or did. He’s not the first person to suggest this. I was reminded of an article from the Coevolution Quarterly that got me thinking about what one might call the collateral benefits of belief. Anne Herbert writes, “we don’t have as many friends as we would if we were born sooner because we’ve renounced most institutions and are left with making friends at work or by inviting people we’ve met casually out to lunch.” Here’s an extract from an article she published in 1978 (wow, that’s a long time ago):

In fact, a lot of this amounts to saying that I miss church.  You non-church-goers should know that Church As I Knew It, in the middle of the road, was nothing like Elmer Gantry. No one cried, and if you pushed people on what they believed, a lot of them were more vague than dogmatic – something about God existing, something about Jesus being special, something about modified altruism being better than pure selfishness.  A lot of what was happening was people with lots of non-religious values in common (political conservatism, family life) getting together once a week to hang out.  It was a nice place to hang out.  If you didn’t like grownups, you could volunteer to hang out with children without having to actually have any.  If you didn’t like big crowds, you could volunteer for the cleanup or preparation committee and hang out with other people who didn’t like crowds and sort of liked shit work in a way, like the volunteers at the Jamboree. Also you could find out if you wanted to be friends with people without doing something artificial like going out to lunch.What my few friends and Tail have in common is that we don’t have as many friends as we would if we were born sooner because we’ve renounced most institutions and are left with making friends at work or by inviting people we’ve met casually out to lunch. I find that un-ideal because it makes my stomach hurt and because if you take someone to lunch you just get each other’s stories, but if you set up folding chairs together, you find out what people are really like and if you really like them.

Sixties leftovers have never really built a low-key institution to hang out together at, and make friends at and casually bullshit about what to do next at.  I think that’s partly because compulsory education crippled us. We were in communities organized by grownups for so long we never learned to.organize our own. What happened to the sixties a lot is that everyone graduated from college and didn’t see each other much. The clean grounds and lovely volunteers at the Jamboree reminded me that much of what people had in common then they have in common now. If they met, casually, regularly, they might have fun and carry it on it was, in a whole new way.

I was surprised by how little the speakers had to say that was new, and it made me think that the newness would be found in the crowd, if they talked to each other long enough, if they lived in a neighborhood together instead of meeting once at a one-time event.

What I think would be good would be some regularly scheduled low-key place where people could meet, maybe hear a hippie sermon about how given our beliefs, we’re better than everyone else, or about how give our beliefs, we’re totally hypocritical and aren’t doing shit to live them out. (Those are the 2 kinds of sermons, and we could use them both.) We could sing a few songs, have a few pot luck suppers and accidentally possibly remake the revolution. I myself wouldn’t do anything to make all this happen, but if it happened, I would set up folding chairs, I would write the newsletter, I would call up people to remind them to bring food to the potluck.

From “The Whole Earth Jamboree Wasn’t Worth It Once”

When I think of religion and community, I remember my time at the California branch of a Switzerland-based Christian community called L’Abri (“the shelter”), and at its English branch in a village in Hampshire. The English village church has a magic about it, perfectly captured at the end of the movie Mrs. Miniver. The Second World War has begun, and the village gathers after a night of bombing in the shattered church. Sun streams in through the roof and through the broken stained-glass windows. The congregation stands with hymn books in hand and sings. “We are together,” that picture says to me, “We are one people, we are here for one another, in sickness and in health, in war and in peace, till death do us part.” That is community.

I agree with Herbert and with de Botton that without church we lack something important. I see it in simple terms: when people go to church once a week, there’s an occasion when (1) everyone is together and welcome, and (2) everyone puts aside daily strife and worries to focus on something outside themselves, on hopes and values that go beyond the material, and (3) they are reminded of shared hopes and values and common purpose.

For another perspective on the consequences of belief, and the need for community, we can turn to a book on world history by a father and son, both eminent world historians. The chapters are jointly authored but there are two conclusions to The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History (Norton, 2003). The father, William H. McNeill, author of the National Book Award winner The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, focuses on community in his conclusions, saying that our future depends on finding new kinds of communities to replace those of the past:

Either the gap between cities and villages will somehow be bridged by renegotiating the terms of symbiosis, and/or differently constructed primary communities will arise to counteract the tangled anonymity of urban life. Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role. But communities of belief must somehow insulate themselves from unbelievers, and that introduces frictions, or active hostilities, into the cosmopolitan web. How then sustain the web and also make room for life-sustaining primary communities?

Ironically, therefore, to preserve what we have, we and our successors must change our ways by learning to live simultaneously in a cosmopolitan web and in various and diverse primary communities. How to reconcile such opposites is the capital question for our time and probably will be for a long time to come. (William H. McNeill and J. R. McNeill 2003, pp. 326<N>327).

More to come on religion in the months ahead. It is important to an understanding of community, and understanding community will help us to see the religious experience more clearly, and perhaps more sympathetically. I also think I can explain some things that a life-long atheist like de Botton just won’t understand because I have been a believer myself, and spent a lot of time around believers. That’s in addition to publishing a vast array of material on world religions written by some of the world’s leading religious scholars.

PS: Three people to read if you want to learn about about religion and community: Robert Bellah, Parker Palmer, and Martin Marty.

Because we know that we can always get on Facebook, or tweet or text, the very manner in which we are interacting in the physical world has changed. We are less engaged and less committed, less dependent upon this moment of being together for our sense of connection and emotional nourishment. Physical interaction has become an impediment to our engaging with technology. We have to hurry up and finish with the people in front of us so that we can get back to tweeting and texting to people who are somewhere else. The system has flipped: People are now the distraction and our on-line world, the main stage.

via Nancy Colier: Virtual Community: Can We Survive It?.

While Black has been fending media calls, Shutts and her family have been fending calls from longtime customers who had moved away but are now planning pilgrimage’s back to support Chagrin Falls’ favorite hardware store.

That sense of community, she said, is what her family will take away from Black’s “cash mob” event, not the day’s profits, which the Shutts have so far declined to release.

“It doesn’t matter about the money, “she said. “Just to see the community and my family’s faces light up like this, it’s worth everything.”

via ‘Cash-Mob’ Creates Movie-Like Fairy Tale for Family Behind Ohio Hardware Store – ABC News.

Anonymity, which flourishes where there is no individual accountability, is one of its key features, and behind it, meanness, antipathy, and cruelty have a tendency to rush right in. As the sociologist Sherry Turkle observes: “Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts that we find useful, comforting, or amusing.”

Here is Chorost describing the wonders of a neural-networked friendship: “Having brainlike computers would greatly simplify the process of extracting information from one brain and sending it to another. Suppose you have such a computer, and you’re connected with another person via the World Wide Mind…. You see a cat on the sidewalk in front of you. Your rig…sees activity in a large percentage of the neurons constituting your brain’s invariant representation of a cat. To let your friend know you’re seeing a cat, it sends three letters of information—CAT—to the other person’s implanted rig. That person’s rig activates her brain’s invariant representation of a cat, and she sees it. Or rather, to be more accurate, she sees a memory of a cat that is taken from her own neural circuitry….”

Now, many important details would be missing. The cat’s breed, its color, its posture, what it’s doing, and so forth…. But it would convey a key piece of information: your friend would know that you are seeing a cat. Of course, if you called or texted or e-mailed your friend, she would also know that you were seeing a cat, and she’d know what it looked like, and what it was doing, and that it was a significant enough event in your life that you were telling her about it. Do we want to know every time someone we know sees a cat?

via Mind Control & the Internet — www.nybooks.com — Readability.

* * * * *

A Smaller Circle: The Search for Community

“The Jane Austen of the alternative world”” –Kirkpatrick Sale

The quest for community – for a smaller circle in which to share and grow – may be the quintessential search of our time. In this moving and exploratory narrative, a young mother with American roots and European experience undertakes that quest, led on by the sense that a life which is simple, sustainable and satisfying must be achievable. Passionate, perceptive and irreverent, A Smaller Circle will challenge all who ask themselves whether, and in what conditions, community is possible.

* * * * *

My job therefore was to find the perfect community, fast, and write the story. I was 32 years old and had lived in London for over 10 years. My first book, Home Ecology, had been published the year before and was doing quite well until McDonalds threatened a lawsuit as part of what became McLibel. With a crushing mortgage, faced with Margaret Thatcher’s infamous “poll tax” (officially known as the Community Charge), my quest didn’t work out as planned, and I did not finish writing the book. But my fascination with community has grown over the years, as I’ve got to know small-town New England and the West Village of New York City, and worked with hundreds of experts from all over the world on the Encyclopedia of Community (published by Sage in 2004), and traveled and worked in China. This blog explore the subject of community in books and in real life, in my stories and in the stories of many other people.

Operating daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., Adrien’s is also open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., providing pre-dawn meals that were once a staple of diners, now a rarity.

“Some nights this place is packed, because we’re one of the few places serving so late,” Bill McGovern said.

He noted it’s also a safe haven for enjoying an overnight meal as customers are respectful of one another.

“There’s a big misconception that being so close to several bars, we have trouble,” McGovern said. “I can’t remember the last time we had a fight.”

via 55 years later, Pittsfield diner is still all in the family – Berkshire Eagle Online.

 When I attend events with lots of Internet-savvy people, like this forum in Shanghai on Nurturing and Commercializing Online Communities, I’m struck by a new type of “two cultures” divide. There’s a business aspect, which I’ll write about later, but what struck me first were the casual references to “living digitally” and “virtual life.” Myself, I don’t think there is such a thing as a virtual life, though I’m happy to use online interaction to enrich my life and work. We have only one life, and our connections with other people are amongst the most important determinants of our personal happiness and our accomplishment and legacy.

Berkshire Blog by Karen Christensen » Two cultures, new cultures.

I’ve been baffled by Foursquare. Reading this list makes me wonder about my understanding of people. I have spent the weekend in New York & Great Barrington with very interesting people & have no desire to publicize the details. And I simply don’t have time to spare. Perhaps there are people giving up Fourquare who would like to do some unpaid work for Berkshire Publishing? It would be more fun and more rewarding, I suspect. Hutong Weekend: Top Ten Signs that it is Time to Leave Foursquare « Silicon Hutong.