Our most robust communities can now be found online. Social media is a powerful communal infrastructure on which millions of people efficiently and effectively share their lives. And while we’re gathering online, our offline ‘commons’ languishes. The town square, the mall, main street, the movie cinema all feel dormant in comparison. Social networks have become the new urban architecture, the ‘commons’ for our time.
So it comes as no surprise that social networks are also a frontier where communal experiments flourish. Consider FarmVille. FarmVille does what nothing else has, it brings together a massive number of people globally to grow and share food. Despite the predictable backlash, as an experiment in community FarmVille is clearly a success. It demonstrates how much common ground we can find as humans who nurture, and who eat. Quite an achievement.
However, some see FarmVille as the ultimate sell-out. It is dismissed on the grounds that true farming (and perhaps even true community) can only happen offline. No one would argue that a virtual zucchini, the kind grown on FarmVille, is better than an actual zucchini. So while social networking represents the most robust version of community that we have today, tomorrow I hope it will not.
What if we see FarmVille as an educational tool (disguised as entertainment), designed to train us to be better at community? In essence, FarmVille may be preparing us to come back offline and be better farmers.
Let’s come back offline and bring our new social networking toolkit with us. Why don’t we create an urban farm that integrates everything we’re learning about community-based sharing from both the physical and the virtual realms? This farm would be an online/offline mash-up of social and community infrastructures that could act as a model for how our 21st century ‘commons’ will work. Sounds to me like the kind of utopia Stewart Brand and “the hippies who built the internet” first imagined, and that can finally be realized today.
February 25, 2010 at 10:51 am |
The same arguement could be said of the game ‘Sims.’ Yet, I do agree that we as a people do need to come off line.
March 4, 2010 at 8:40 am |
Hi all. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but according to Lord Monckton (British climate change skeptic) the Copenhagen treaty is about a world government that is void of any democratic process (http://2gb.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=4998). It seems that the public are being distracted with relatively non-issues as the last of our freedom is being stolen.
As for FarmVille and the likes, I feel they have a way of inspiring us to get back to the basics of life and the propagation of it. Yet having experienced FarmVille, I know how easily it became a distraction to offline horticulture.
I think we can learn from FarmVille and, though it is a codified, limited experience of community that doubtlessly lacks the complexity of moral and political dynamics, maybe we will more clearly identify our necessities and the elements of a healthy community.
Lets come back offline :)
March 5, 2010 at 12:57 pm |
Hi Stephanie,
I work with a nonprofit called the greenhorns (www.thegreenhorns.net) and we are developing an online database and social network for America’s young farmers, http://www.serveyourcountryfood.net. The virtue of this network, and what makes it relevant here, is that we are loading tools onto the site that make it easier for young farmers to connect and organize in real life, offline. Parties, mixers, workshops, rallies, whatever. It is ideally a common space that is based primarily on the actions of the users offline than online.
Patrick Kiley