The Evolution of Community (and the Internet) (post 3)

Today is a day for reaching out to those you love, and I hope everyone is able to do that.
Happy Valentine's Day.

As the last post was on relationships, this one is dedicated to the concept of community as well as ways in which the internet is changing it.

What I mean by community is what I believe everyone means by community - groups of people who all know each other and interact with one another at certain times in certain contexts.

There was once a time (tens of thousands of years ago) when all people lived together in well defined communities - groups of about 30 to 300 people who would eat, sleep, work and rest amongst each other day in and day out.  Regardless of how well they liked each other, they knew each other and depended on each other.  This was the rather simple social system from which we all come.

With the arise of civilization, communities became more complex - the number of communities to which people could belong became greater, and types of communities became more diverse and less well defined.  This trend has continued until today where things are very complicated and where it might be easy for people to count their friends and acquaintances but difficult to identify groups who eat, rest and work with each other on a regular basis or for sustained periods of time.  The most clearly defined community we have is usually the people we work with, who, if we're lucky, are counted among our friends, but are more often people we would not voluntarily associate with if given a choice.  And that, I believe, is and has been a major source of discontent in the modern world - too many people spend far too much time separated from people who care for and about each other.

Why has civilization had this disruptive affect on the structures of communities?   One theory is as follows.  Humans are ideally suited to live in communities of about 150 people.  This is known as Dunbar's number (identified by Anthropologist Robin Dunbar).  When we try to exist in group sizes that are significantly larger than 150 people, cognitive dissonance and social chaos escalate.  In ancient times, this would cause large groups to fracture into smaller groups and separate.  However, as populations within regions increased, it became increasingly difficult for large groups to simply fracture and separate.  Warfare between rival groups intensified, and groups that could figure out ways to maintain membership sizes above Dunbar's number gained an important advantage.  At that point there were two opposing forces pressuring group size: psychological dissonance and social chaos pressuring large groups to fracture, and inter-group competition and the need for size advantages pressuring groups to grow larger.  Civilizations were born whenever humans figured out how to overcome the dissonance and chaos created by increased group size and get larger numbers of people to live in closer proximity and work toward common goals.  The need and ability to increase group size and overcome dissonance grew throughout history and accelerated during the industrial revolution and modernity.

So the sizes of top-level social entities are at all time highs, and while that gives nations like China and corporations like Walmart many competitive advantages, it wrecks havoc on the sense of community and social well-being of the people existing within these monstrosities.  It is no wonder why prescriptions for anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications continue to increase at alarming rates.

And so we have a sort of Catch-22.  In order to succeed in this world, we must live within social structures capable of banding together tens and hundreds of millions of people - structures that are necessarily deleterious to the formation and maintenance of authentic communities and to our psychological well-being.  In order to succeed in this world, we may have to work for companies we don't necessarily like, help make or sell products we don't necessarily believe in, move our families to another town, have our children educated by strangers, or live amongst neighbors with different values, tastes and beliefs.  This is not ideal.  It is not how we want to live, but it is how we live, and we come to accept it even as we look for ways to make it better.

It may be that the internet - and especially social networking - affords a unique solution to our most prominent and problematic social ailments.  It gives us a way to fight against the isolating and community fracturing forces of civilization.  Maybe this is why so many are proclaiming that the internet is about to change us and our societies in ways far more profound and fundamental than any other social or cultural revolution in history.  Over the past few weeks, two nations have used to internet to overthrow their governments.  Smart phones and social networking are increasing their dominance over every aspect of our social and professional lives.  We use them to find companies we want to work for, find products we believe in, stay connected to family and friends no matter where we might live, send our children to the schools of our choice, and learn a bit more about why our neighbors hold their strange values - making them seem a bit less strange.

And this is just the beginning.  The internet is in its infancy.  Who knows what its full potential might be.

The revolution does not need to be televised.  It's free to download off the internet.