Cloudy1′s Blog
Just another WordPress.com weblogCommunities and the influence on those within – 16 April 2009
When the word community is said it conjures up the image of an idyllic little village where everyone helps each other out and they all live together in harmony! However after thinking about this in more detail the word community can encompass various numbers (couldn’t two people be a community, a family?) and we can belong to various numbers of communities throughout our lives.
The sense of identity can often bring people into a communityof like minded people but when do the influences made on individuals in the community become risky? The communities I am thinking of are the ones where those members join a pact to become pregnant? Or the more sinister communities where the members all decide to commit suicide or even worse harm others? Surely this is a frightening side to community? Does the feeling to truly belong to a group mean that we will block out our own standards and are overcome by the power of the mass just to be loved? Do communities alienate other people to the detriment of the individual? What makes one community more powerful than another? Communities do help and protect those who belong to them, but they can also prove bullying when people who don’t join and this can be extremely harrowing. Is this why we are seeing a high rate of teenagers, in places like America, deciding that the communities (school pupils) who have alienated them deserve to be punished and choose the most gruesome of punishments and enter their schools with a gun and proceed to shoot.
What about the global community? How can you be sure that who the other members of the virtual community you join are who they say they are? We all feel the need to belong, and this can cloud our judgement and can lead to us trusting people we have never met before. The internet seems to have taken down barriers for people but it also seems to be a place where people don’t take as much responsibility for their actions.
This virtual community where people can pretend to be anyone they want to be and join any internal communities within it.
What has happened to our society that people would rather be virtually talking than really talking, we would rather text our messages than take the time to call or visit? Technological advances have allowed us to become isolated without really being aware of it. However people who feel alienated within their own immediate community can reach out to others who are experiencing the same feelings and gain the support they need from their new virtual community.
Does the on-line community undermine the offline community or do we need both in our lives?
