Community

“Community suggests a place and a space of commonality — sharing. Community also suggests difference — characteristics which distinguish one group from another, one individual from another. As Anthony Cohen has put it, community expresses a “relational idea that allows social groups to define and create boundaries between themselves and others.

Community, the profound sense of attachment that we have to place and to people, is as much about geography as it is about imagination. The maps we draw produce borders that we cross with our minds even as we defend the more closed and shadowy concepts of nation, province or locality.

Comments

[Sara Diamond]

ISEA 2006 has two sessions on Community Domain, one that I chaired today, we were talking about the efforts in digital media and mobile media to construct "communities" through narratives, participatory engagement, etc. Here is where we started:

I would argue that Geert Lovinck expropriated the term, “community��?, back into socially engaged creative new media. He linked community with public rights and access. After all, “community��? had been re-routed & routed during the 1990s, understood to be the most important quality of commercial Internet success. Building community meant building enterprise. Community was a troubled word long before that—from activist roots it had come to stand in for post-war middle class suburban enclosures-- the model community became a form of control in the Dirty Wars in Guatemala and elsewhere. In our work today, we hope to explore the ways that the radical qualities of identity, solidarity, social networks, are countered by the ways that community can enact essentialisms, closures and exclusions. It can be a means of forming invisible power and cultural norms, or habitus, as Bourdieu proposes. On the other hand, it can also be a force for “minoritarian memory��?, as Rosi Braidotti proposes, “the process of becoming by liberating something akin to Foucault’s “counter memory��?: a faculty that instead of retrieving in a linear order specifically categorized memories, functions instead as a deterritorializing agency��?.

Our panel met yesterday, after the day’s symposium in order to digest both exhibitions and symposium. Our dialogue revolved around several key issues: the contemporary reliance on story and in particular, documentary realism, and testimonials in notions of collectivity organisation -- versus dialogical form -- and the impact of these practices by artists to the process of history-making, monumentalising, in urban data creation projects. Hence surely we need to unpack history-making as a series of negotiated procedures.

If we act as context providers in relation to "community" —what questions do we ask? What histories do we refuse & why? What happens to the histories of violence, shame, racism—of truth and reconciliation -- to the city building project? What is our responsibility in unearthing histories to their sources? What is the role of monumentalising, for whom, to what? What are the ethics of contemporary community making?

[Fanya]

The beautiful thing about the internet is that whole new communities are built made up of like-minded people - as differs from geographical communities - where a personality can be formed - but there will always be dissent and discord within.