Jeremiah Tolbert

December 7 – Community.

Where have you dis­cov­ered com­mu­nity, online or oth­er­wise, in 2010? What com­mu­nity would you like to join, cre­ate or more deeply con­nect with in 2011?

(Author: Cali Harris)

I have had mixed results with com­mu­nity.  It’s some­thing I want in the­ory, but in prac­tice my intro­verted ways usu­ally sab­o­tage my inten­tion to belong.  Earlier this year, I tem­porar­ily became a mem­ber of a local cowork­ing group.  For the first time since col­lege I felt con­nected to a local com­mu­nity instead of an online one.  I’ve lived in com­mu­ni­ties in the grander sense, but rarely have felt part of them—always feel­ing dis­tinct and not like I belonged.

I felt good about the cowork­ing at first, but over time I came to find it not con­du­sive to my own work needs—I was work­ing from my lap­top and the screen real estate felt cramped, and because I was so eager to be part of a com­mu­nity, my work suf­fered.  And then there was the mock­ing that devel­oped from other mem­bers.  Nothing seri­ous, but enough that I didn’t feel like devot­ing any energy.  I’m sure it was meant in good fun, but I have a low tol­er­ance for being made fun of, due to hav­ing had to put up with nasty forms of it as a child.

I never seem to have much trou­ble find­ing com­mu­nity online.  This year, my com­mu­nity online seems to be cen­tered around Twitter.  I have some qualms about hav­ing my major sense of belong­ing tied to some­thing that is lim­ited to 130 char­ac­ters at a time, but it does work.  And when you work from home alone day in, day out, hav­ing some way of feel­ing like you’re not alone is help­ful.   Twitter fills that role for me now.  In the long run, I would like a “real world” com­mu­nity to belong to—something Rockwellian, only full of artists and cre­atives maybe.  John Joseph Adams and I have talked sev­eral times about his notion of Geektopia—a com­mu­nity pop­u­lated entirely by geeks who relo­cate to cre­ate a com­mu­nity of their own.   If such a place existed—I would seri­ously con­sider mov­ing there.  We’ve been eye­balling the parts of the coun­try where you can get free land.   Problem is, build­ing an entire town from scratch costs mil­lions.  So until we get some mil­lion­aire back­ing the idea, it will remain a pipe dream.  But it’s one that I would love to see become a real­ity.  Some day.

Until then, the inter­net is my com­mu­nity, for bet­ter and worse.

The prompt for the 8th is about what makes me beau­ti­ful and dif­fer­ent and I just don’t feel like answer­ing that one, so I’m going to skip it.  I also skipped one about “what did you cre­ate?” because it would be silly for me to list all that.

Share This:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•