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.

As we watch this week for further breakthroughs in Copenhagen, China seems to be leading the US in crucial areas of sustainability:

China will arrive at this week’s Copenhagen climate change negotiations with a whole package of measures to reduce its “carbon intensity.” While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.

What does this have to do with FarmVille?

Like many things, FarmVille is an import. From China. Online farming games were invented there, and have been wildly popular ever since. Social farm games now dominate all major Chinese social networking sites. No surprise, perhaps, given China’s vast number of small-scale agricultural cooperatives, and its history of using farming as “education.”

China has been experimenting with farming games for much longer than we have, so it fits that they’re also leading the way in bringing online farming back offline. For example, Happy Farm In Reality, which is inspired by the popular Chinese “Happy Farm” game.

Happy Farm in Reality is a Shanghai “farm,” with 100 cabins designed for city farmers to use during extended holidays.

From People’s Daily:

Mr. Liu, a white-collar worker who lives in the Pudong district with his family, rented a piece of farmland in the suburb with a 3, 000 yuan membership fee. When weekend comes, the whole family likes to drive to their own farm to have fun. Watering, weeding, fertilizing and worming, each bringing them unique fun. And during the harvest season, they usually take the harvest back to enjoy with their friends and neighbors. Mr. Liu said they took part in the program on one hand to bring the family and child a special experience, and on the other, so they can eat the products without any concerns about pollution. He also said since the membership began more than a month ago, they have go to their farm every weekend to experience the special happiness.

It’s fun to imagine the technological experiments that will be unfolding at Happy Farm in Reality. They already include a video system where you can monitor a patch over the internet from home, “an online recreation of a real simulation of an online video game based on real life farming.”

Now, if China’s advances in sustainability could merge with its innovations in online/offline farming, then we’d really be getting somewhere.

'I Forget What' by Chantale Doyle

What is community?

Or more specifically, is community a location or an action? Is it a geographically organized grouping of humans, buildings, infrastructure, goods and services? Or is it an invisible ‘place-less’ set of behaviors that lives within each of us, and is characterized by how we interact with each other?

Is community a noun, or a verb?

Perhaps we don’t think enough about the specifics of community. We pay it a lot of lip service as a general idea, but we don’t have a collective agreement around what community is, where it is, when it is, or how it is. Therefore, we don’t really know if it’s a noun, a verb or something else altogether.

So I’ll put a stake in the ground: I think community is a verb.

An example:

My Joshua Tree friend Chantale Doyle broke her leg this week. Not one of those minor, I’ll-be-in-a-cast-for-a-few-weeks breaks, but a serious one. She had surgery, she won’t be able to drive for many months, and she needs a lot of care right now.

Chantale is smart, interesting, brave, and super-talented. She’s an artist, and she runs the coolest retail store and hangout in town Mt. Fuji General Store. And (yes, there’s more!) she’s a chef who hosts an incredibly popular, roving “secret” dinner party called Bistro Escondido.

Chantale is a friend, but she’s also someone I’m in community with. We’re both in Joshua Tree (at least some of the time), but that geographical fact isn’t why we’re in community. Chantale and I are in community because she has repeatedly drawn me into her world.

Chantale has a knack for community. She knows how to foster it: how to motivate, how to have fun, how to give back, and how to inspire. She’s at the center of a loose collective of creative people who share geographic proximity, progressive values, and a pioneering spirit. And she has welcomed me into this collective – this community — often enough that I feel part of it. I feel valued within it. I feel responsible to it.

I went to visit Chantale yesterday, and she asked me to bring her some magazines. (She knows I’m a magazine junkie, and she’s a junkie too. We’ve often laughed about the piles of unread, partially-read, and dog-earred magazines scattered throughout our respective houses.) It was a simple thing. Easy to do. I was happy to comply. In a heartbeat. A no-brainer. She’s asked others in our community for things, too. Specific things that make sense given who we are, and our role in the community. We’re all happy to help. It goes without saying.

And yet, it’s the saying that matters. Chantale is very good at defining her needs and asking for help in getting them met. She understands the give-and-take of community. She understands that she can ‘take’ from a community as readily as she gives. And that ‘taking’ is not asking for a favor. It’s not charity. It’s just part of being in community. It is a communal behavior. A behavior that I’m admittedly quite bad at. I rarely know when, why or how to ask for help from my communities. And when I do manage to figure it out, I still end up feeling like I’m imposing on them, rather than engaging with them.

So, if community is a verb, a set of behaviors that an individual performs as part of a group, how do we know how to act in community? Do some people just have a knack for it? (like Chantale) Do we learn it at school? At home? Among friends? Is it instinctive? Did we know how to do it back in the day (caveman times), and not so much now? And most important, if we’re bad at various aspects of it (like I am), can we get better with practice?

Perhaps our communal behaviors need to be codified. Let’s take them from vague instincts to universally understood and accepted patterns. We know how to read, ride a bike, Tweet and grow tomatoes. Let’s also know how to be communal.

I think FarmVille’s community-building prompt is genius as it codifies community as a ‘give and take’ behavior in just the way I’m talking about:

Stephanie Smith sent a request using FarmVille: Here is a Chicken for your farm in FarmVille. Could you help me by sending a gift back?

Nothing could be simpler… here is a gift. You can help me by sending one back…

Posted in Society ]]> http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/community-is-a-verb-part-1/feed/ 0 Stephanie iforgetwhat http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/the-digitization-of-consumption/ http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/the-digitization-of-consumption/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:43:10 +0000 Stephanie Smith http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/?p=93 ]]>

Can virtual goods make us more green?

Zynga, the makers of FarmVille, make money by selling virtual goods. Virtual goods are the economic engine behind social media and online entertainment. And the virtual goods market is enormous (an estimated $2 billion and growing). 

An article in today’s Science Daily identifies a positive side effect to this massive new form of global consumption: It’s better for the earth.

“In public discourse, spending real money on virtual goods is frequently dismissed as an irrational fad or as a result of abusive marketing. But Lehdonvirta’s thesis suggests that the fundamental drivers of virtual consumption are found in individuals’ social and hedonic motivations.

“People buy virtual goods for the same reasons as they buy material goods. In online spaces, virtual goods can function as markers of status, elements of identity and means towards ends in the same way as material consumer goods do in similarly contrived physical spaces.

“From a macroeconomic perspective, it does not matter what consumers buy, as long as they keep on spending. Virtual consumption might offer an ecological way out of this consumer society’s dilemma…” Read the full article

FarmVille and the Food Network have a lot in common. Both use the entertainment and social medias of our time — what I’ll call the ‘secret ingredients’ — to promote a shift in values. Note Michelle Obama’s cameo on Iron Chef. She’s putting her crusade to reduce childhood obesity in front of those it can affect most (almost 1.5 million viewers watch every episode, with a core audience of 25- to 54-year-olds).

Chef and ‘competitor’ Mario Batali sums it up this way:

“What’s exciting for us is this is the first time I can remember the White House taking an active interest in doing something about diet and health,” he said. “They understand this kind of P.R.”

He continued, “If we don’t do something about how kids eat soon, it will be simply the largest problem facing this country.”

Posted in Media, Politics ]]> http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/the-secret-ingredient/feed/ 0 Stephanie White House Chef http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/the-pastoral-imperative-%e2%80%9ci%e2%80%99m-sick-of-this-modern-urban-lifestyle%e2%80%a6%e2%80%9d/ http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/the-pastoral-imperative-%e2%80%9ci%e2%80%99m-sick-of-this-modern-urban-lifestyle%e2%80%a6%e2%80%9d/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:32:14 +0000 Stephanie Smith http://learningfromfarmville.wordpress.com/?p=31 ]]>

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.

Compare two recent articles:

‘Suddenly, America digs farming‘ in the LATimes, which critiques the FarmVille phenomenon:

There is, to put it mildly, a curious dichotomy in the fact that tens of millions of people are losing sleep over virtual crop rotation while the refrain about Americans’ growing waistlines and junky diet grows louder by the day.

Are we to infer from the FarmVille phenomenon that people are finally switching their allegiances from Swiss rolls by Little Debbie to Swiss chard by Mother Earth? Or does FarmVille simply represent a subculture of Internet-savvy hipsters who, like the agri-hotties on the Huffington Post, say less about what is actually happening than about what some people think is cool at this particular moment?

And ‘Handpicked‘ in the NYTimes, which offers a glowing and very seductive account of the beginnings of the rural and “utopian” Philo Apple Farm:

They began fantasizing about life in the Anderson Valley, a hard-to-reach area in Mendocino County with its own dialect and an economy that runs partly on the barter system. A real estate agent showed Don and Sally a run-down apple farm in Philo that reminded them of  “the old Napa.”

“So they called us and asked us if we wanted to be apple farmers,” recalls Karen, one of the Schmitts’ five children. “We said yes! with no hesitation, knowing nothing about it.” The Philo Apple Farm was born.

My takeaway based on these two articles is that the media considers authenticity in farming to be land-based. And in fact it prizes a deep and rooted connection to rural, physical land above all else. But to consider rural farming experiments like those conducted by The Schmitts as more authentic than FarmVille (played by so-called “Internet-savvy hipsters”) is to miss the point, and to miss the zeitgeist.

A ‘physical’ farm is not inherently better than a ‘virtual’ farm. We may need a new way to understand authenticity, a way that is not entirely dependent upon physicality.

During the last “back-to-the-land” movement hippies started over 30,000 urban and rural communes. These young communards were ill-prepared; they lacked the tools they needed to come together, share resources and manifest the new world they desired. So Stewart Brand created the groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog to help them, describing it simply as “access to tools.”

I am obsessively reading From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism to learn more about what happened in the late 60s. The book tracks how ”counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers…”

These “hippies who built the Internet,” could they have imagined FarmVille? Stewart, if you are reading this, would you please comment on FarmVille??

FarmVille is Facebook’s #1 most popular application, and Mafia Wars is #2. How did we get here? How did we get to a moment in pop-culture history when farming is more entertaining than fighting?

The NYTimes suggests FarmVille represents “a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.” And that, “the method of dragging food out of the ground and getting something for it is really satisfying.” This is presumably what’s ‘entertaining’ about FarmVille.

Instead, I like to think of FarmVille as a grouping of tools (disguised as entertainment), designed to train us to be better at community. FarmVille is more like values-based “edu-tainment” than entertainment. And it is meeting a collective need we have for more knowledge, and more practice, in the “art” of communal culture. And reading further into the phenomenon, perhaps we are subconsciously no longer training for war.