The Online Quest for Community

“What happened to Brock??” 

I will never forget the moment I saw these words. On Monday morning more than two years ago now, I was walking towards my son’s daycare to drop him off that morning, and I had checked my phone and seen that there was an unread message in the Facebook Messenger app. Upon opening it, I saw those words.

“What happened to Brock??”

Not knowing what they were referring to, I went to Brock’s Facebook page, on which I found a post from his wife. I cannot remember her exact words and I cannot bring myself to look it up; suffice it to say, Brock had passed away very suddenly, in his sleep. He was not yet 40. I had seen him, had broken bread with him, not one week prior, at which time he had seemed in perfect health.

Brock was a friend I had come to know first on Twitter, and so was the person whose Facebook message alerted me that something was amiss.

Brock was a friend, a dear friend, whose death hurt me deeply, and personally. But I did not have to grieve alone, and privately. Brock’s death was not just my personal loss, nor even just a loss to his family who loved and needed him so dearly. It was also a loss to several overlapping communities, from whom there emanated a public outpouring of support for his wife and three young children first and foremost, but also for one another.

These communities were, by and large, located online.

Real community

In a recent interview with sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, Antonio García Martínez argued that “digital forms of community basically killed real community.” Tufekci did not let him finish the sentence:

I’m going [to] disagree. This is funny, but like, there’s no reason why the digital forms of community are unreal, or less real. It’s a big it depends. There are a lot of communities that are digital only that are very, very real communities.

García Martínez remained skeptical: 

These communities seem very real, until they actually have to do something in the real world, requiring IRL trust and coordination. Imagine you said: Hey, let’s go build a barn together! While they’re capable of making a flash mob of a million people show up in DC tomorrow, they couldn’t do the smallest thing that an Amish farming community could do. They can’t even organize a political party. Anything that’s Old World, that’s not a group on Facebook, they seem at pains to influence in a persistent way.

García Martínez has a typical modern communitarian’s view of “real community,” a view grounded in Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft or Karl Polanyi’s analysis of pre-capitalist society or dozens of other capital-R Romantic treatments of pre-modern agriculture and village life, performed by people living in urban, modern environments.

An important difference is that those writers were making their arguments before the Internet existed. The “real community” had been lost, in their view, not because it had been “killed” by “digital forms,” but because of the growth of large, urban, commercial societies (Gesellschaft in Tönnies’s terminology). Tufekci is therefore more on the mark when she argues that online communities are “not unreal, but they’re like cities that haven’t bound people’s futures together.” The freedom but also the potential isolation and vulnerability of cities is a longstanding trope in literature and in social commentary.

But Tufekci does not doubt the authenticity of urban or online forms of community:

Let’s go back to the Arab Spring. Yeah. A lot of the people that played key roles, many of them had met maybe once or twice here and there because of conferences and stuff, but these are people with Egyptian and Tunisian passports, so you don’t really travel very easily. But they had a really strong digital fabric: they talk with each other, they thought about each other, they worried about each other.

What is lost, and what is gained, when we spend much of our time in these forms of community rather than “IRL” ones? In order to answer these questions, I’m going to have to dig a little deeper into this notion of “real community.”

Ways of being together

“Community” is a word that carries much baggage but little specificity. Referencing a summary of the literature on this, Chandran Kukathas discussed three traditional models. The first is Tönnies’s, which rests on “geographical locality” and “some common origin” such as “ties of blood and kinship, as well as shared habitats, attitudes, and experiences” all of which are “organic” as opposed to contractual or otherwise voluntarily chosen. The second is exemplified by Rober MacIver who envisioned community as fundamentally being about shared interests. “A community, for MacIver, can be the product of the will of its members; but it also had to be a will for the good or interests the members had in common. Like Tönnies, he sees a shared locality as a necessary condition of community, but his model differs from the first insofar as historical ties or associations are not essential” The last model, which Kukathas does not attribute to any one thinker, removes even the need for shared locality or a strong commitment to the good of the group, bringing “trade unions and professional organizations” and even groups with “relatively weak bonds of commitment” to fall under this definition. Kukathas himself considers community any “collectivity of individuals who share an understanding of what is public and what is private within that collectivity.”

I am not going to insist on any of these definitions. Indeed, it seems to me that the stakes of defining the word “community” do not rise above the level of clarifying the specific concepts that a specific person, such as Kukathas, will be discussing. When García Martínez says that online communities are not real communities, he is not suggesting that Tufekci needs to consult a dictionary. He is suggesting that they do not matter, that they fall short of some moral standard by being too frivolous, too loosely bound together, too lacking in depth or wisdom or merit. Take your pick.

But the range of ways of being together are vast, and the ways in which they can be meaningful and important in people’s lives equally so. Too many people imbibe deeply from Romantic currents and end up blind to the many possibilities that exist. Let us try to correct this tendency without becoming blind ourselves to the legitimate sources of the Romantic’s concerns.

At a high level, there are two basic considerations when thinking about togetherness: association and commonality. Association is the active component of being together, and should be understood expansively to include anything which involves two or more people engaging in something jointly. A conversation held one time between two people who never meet or speak again is an association, albeit a very transient one, and so is the Catholic Church.

Commonality is simply some shared characteristic, including shared interests. It can be a basis of association, but does not need to be. People can agree to associate for an enormous variety of reasons. One can join an activist organization, for example, because one wants to change the world, or because one is lonely, or simply because a job offer is extended and found to be adequate. Three individuals with one of these motives each might have very little commonality other than the fact of their being a part of the same organization. And the basis of their association, in this case, would not be commonality at all.

Commonality can also be a source of something people call “community” even when there’s no specific association they have in mind. People who happen to enjoy a particular music subgenre may not have thought of themselves as belonging to a community at all, until someone invoked a phrase such as “the punk community” or “the hip hop community.” These phrases may encourage people to self-consciously identify as members of these imagined communities, and perhaps take measures to associate with others who feel the same way—but it also may not. Simply having something in common does not imply association, nor need association imply much in common beyond the association itself.

Romantics and communitarians in the tradition of Tönnies are dismissive of forms of togetherness except where there is a very strong, historically rooted association with a very high degree of commonality among its membership. Against this, I want to insist that even a single conversation between two people can have a lasting impact and be deeply meaningful for both of them. And online forms of association tend to be venues for conversation between individuals and in groups.

But some commonality is necessary for associations to perform some functions. Two people do not necessarily have to be fluent in the same language in order to be employed by the same company, but they do have to have at least one language they can both get by in before they can talk to one another. Similarly, two people do not need to live in the same locality in order to have an active friendship—even in the 18th century, an educated person might communicate with their dearest friends chiefly through letters. But they do need to live in the same locality to regularly rely on one another for certain things; if my wife and I both fall ill, I cannot send our children to a distant friend’s home for a couple of hours so that we can get some much needed rest.

Aside from geographical distance, there may be an emotional distance. There may be people I know who live nearby, who I may even have been close to once, who I might not feel comfortable asking for help when I need it. And of course, there is also institutional distance; it is the rare former coworker with who occupies as fixed a position in the contours of our daily lives as they did when they were a current coworker.

Just as there are many forms of togetherness there are many forms of separation. Walls exist even among the most intimate of relations, for we are never entirely transparent with one another. We are hardly transparent with ourselves.

Online together

I came to know Brock through Twitter, some time in 2013. Brock took an interest in what I was writing at that time, and showed it by becoming, in current parlance, a reply guy. It was not written in the stars that we would become friends. At times I found him more annoying than interesting to talk to. But I had been in his shoes plenty of times, being a little overeager and perhaps a little combative in seeking people online who shared interest in the same topics that I did. In time, a mutual fondness developed between us.

In 2014 some friends and I started a group blog called Sweet Talk. Brock was among those friends. The blog became a locus for our little band, a sort of anchor. Though we posted quite often, most of our conversations took place in closed and semi-overlapping Facebook groups dedicated to various topics. And of course, there was Twitter. Twitter was where we could talk with one another in the presence of people who were not part of our little closed groups (to which we could retreat and gossip about the happenings out there). We talked with readers of ours and people we were readers of. We participated in a larger scene of people interested in philosophy and social science and all manner of things. You could map it out as network clusters, you could describe it phenomenologically, but it felt like community. A community of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and a few overlapping communities of common interests.

If you must take the word “community” from me, then so be it. We associated, as friends, as co-bloggers, as members of various groups and participants in various conversation spaces about passions and topics of interest we held in common.

And yet I did hold back. I held back from my wife, who was not interested in such things and to whom I therefore did not talk to about them much. And I held back from Brock, and the others of our group, who I allowed to remain too separate from the contours of my life, in spite of my love for them. There still was, and perhaps still is, some part of me that shared García Martínez’s doubt that time spent in chat rooms or on social media could be worth taking seriously. Perhaps it was not lack of interest on the part of the people in my daily life that kept me quiet, but my own fear that the intensity of my feelings reflected a certain childishness on my part, an unseriousness, a failure to grow up and focus on what was in front of me. And above all, the nature of online association simply made it easy to maintain these boundaries.

This had real consequences. In 2015, my wife and I visited Austin, where I could have met several of my friends, not the least of whom is my Liberal Currents co-founder Jason Briggeman. I did not impress upon my wife how much this might mean to me, and so I did not take that opportunity. Despite being a friend very near to my heart, I have still not met Jason and his family in person. More gravely still was the occasion that Brock organized a gathering of our friends right in Brooklyn, practically in my own back yard. We had just recently had our first son and I was anxious not to impose any social obligations on my family. So I kept my visit with this group short, missing the opportunity to make a few more hours of memories with Brock, as well as the opportunity for our families to spend time together jointly.

That possibility is now forever lost. 

On the day I learned of that loss, the members of the communities that Brock left behind talked at length of our mutual sense of disbelief, of our unwillingness to accept the reality of it. We asked one another if anyone knew what exactly had happened, but no one did, for the announcement of his passing was not specific, nor would we dream of asking so insensitive a question of his family. But it did not matter what had happened; whatever else had happened, Brock was gone. About that, there was no doubt. Our questioning after the details was a kind of avoidance, a way of trying to make sense of this senseless reality, to dispatch it with some essential facts of the case.

Above all, we rallied behind Brock’s family, and to one another. Brock was not only a D&D nerd and a social science wonk, he was also a Catholic, and active in online Catholic circles. I will never forget Michael Brendan Dougherty and Elizabeth Bruenig, two very different sorts of Catholics, sharing the GoFundMe link for Brock’s family to their vast audiences. One of our extended group organized a campaign for friends of Brock’s to write something about him on paper, and promised to deliver these to Brock’s family personally at the funeral. We commented on the heart-wrenching updates posted by Brock’s wife, offering what meager emotional support we could.

Dave, another former Sweet Talker and one of the dearest friends I have in this world, observed that we were grieving together and yet alone, each of us in our separate locations, some as far as Alberta, Canada. And yet it was a grief we shared, truly.

I have tried to take my online friendships and associations much more seriously since that time. I have tried to hold back less, with them and with the people more “bound up” in my intimate life. After losing Brock, I can no longer countenance the idea that these things are less serious, less worthy, or less “real” than any other way of being together. The friendship we had, and the groups we associated with, were and are as real as any community has ever been.

Featured Image is Map showing the telegraph lines in operation, under contract, and contemplated, to complete the circuit of the globe