On hold until Mid-Jan
I’m off to Egypt on Monday so I suspect this will be my last post until then.
Hope you all have a great new year and festive season.
Bloody Baby Boomers
I had the good fortune to be asked to speak at BWM Edge, Federation Square, last night with Terry Lane, Lyn Allison and a few others. The topic was “Democracy – Beyond Elections, Get up and Do Something,” hosted by the wonderful Frank Fisher.
I spoke extensively on what I see as the cutting edge of democracy and participation – Free and Open Source Software.* Terry talk about, well, the good old days. And who can blame him? He’s a fantastic orator, but also a baby boomer.
In my talk I had briefly discussed the idea of community and how, in this digital age, we really needed to rethink how we understand “community”. This seemed to capture the audience’s imagination and much of the discussion following revolved around this. Terry was silent the entire discussion.
To conclude the session, each panelist was asked to provide a concluding remark. Terry went first. “I find this notion of a community where you can’t actually have physical contact with the person completely bogas” he said and then went on to list a series of things that constitute a community in his mind, including the local bowls club. The comment was clearly directed at me.
The local bowls club! I’m 28 for Christ’s sake. If I go to the local bowls club its for cheap beer and a health dose of irony.
Now admittedly I was taken aback by the comment. It wasn’t the time or the place to launch into a rant about the baby boomers. I simply assured Terry that I “profoundly disagreed” with him and moved on. But perhaps now is the time and place for a rant.
Firstly to the issue at hand. Yes, you can have a community online with people on the other side of the world and form quite close bonds. For example, I’m part of the broader World Social Forum community as I was involved in the Melbourne Social Forum for some time and helped build their website in that time. On the basis of that I’m now in close regular contact with the LA Social Forum as I help them with a few of their website issues. I certainly feel I’ve a close bond with those comrades in LA and have a common sense of identity on quite a few topics.
Through my personal blog, I’ve met several people, some of whom I now consider close friends, and one of which helped me found the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice. We were commenting regularly on each other’s blogs and found a great ideological convergence so decided to meet up. It was a really meeting of the minds so I explained my vision for the Centre to him and he was a board member the next day. Online communities often lead to personal interaction.
Furthermore, these baby boomer types seem to be of the impression that we’re really alienated by technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones because you can just punch out a quick SMS or email and never have to actually talk to anyone. What they overlook is that the SMS, email, or facebook message is about: what time are we meeting up tonight?
And all this is without even touching on the communities that are collaboratively building entire operating systems, engaged in extensive dialog about the finer nuances of this and forming a robust communities capable of producing standout products whist being spread out across the world (Firefox anyone?).
There are two key types of community, both are important. There’s the more traditional definition of community that is based on location, and there is community based on identity, or a community of interest. What is ‘bogus’ (to borrow a phrase) is prioritising one over the other.
Physical interaction, physical contact is extraordinarily important. Robert Putnam and others have certainly taught us that it is a health issue. We are at much higher risk of disease without it. However, to shut out the entire realm of electronic communication is limiting us to a time, that could be described as a time when the baby boomers ruled the earth. Thankfully they are all starting to retire.
*if I get the chance I’ll post my speech but it requires writing it all out and I doubt I’ll get the chance in the near future, although hopefully a recording will be made available.
