The Public Professor

Molly writes:

Susan writes: I think of community in biological terms.  Ants have communities, bees have communities,

Here’s a nice piece by Paul Harris of The Guardian in which he updates readers on the positive fallout from his prior articles about a small group of people in Detroit who are working to turn a patch of urban desolation (which there is, sadly, far too much of  in that city) into a vegetable garden and playground. referring to the strengthening of relationships among the people working on this garden.  Their shared vision, labor, and dedication to a common goal is resulting in an increased sense of connectedness.  Together the participants are reaping benefits.  But they are also developing mutual obligations and responsibilities, and presumably rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not.  All of these are hallmarks of a real community. So here’s a question.  If big cities are an impediment to communities, can their otherwise tragedy of their ongoing dilapidation provide the opportunity for new, small communities to rise in their wake?  After decades of depopulation and economic collapse, can rust belt cities like Detroit witness the birth of new communities amid their ashes?  Is it possible to build a modern version of a historic community by developing small, close-knit, semi-rural  population centers in nearly abandoned urban neighborhoods?

Q&A with the Public Professor – 1.5 Reinhardt: Social media like Facebook, Twitter, and a number of others are of course book.  And through that, Facebook has a very real connection to the book.  But at the end of the day, it’s a very minor connection, and Facebook is not the book.  The book is the book.  Likewise, an actual community could use Facebook, or another online social media outlet as a tool for communication, and in that way Facebook would have a very real but, all things considered, very minor connection to the community.  But that doesn’t mean we should confuse Facebook with the actual community it might be connected to. My argument is that in America there are no more actual communities, and I end up defining social media like Facebook as surrogate communities: things that people now use to recreate in some ways the connectedness of an actual community, a replacement to fill in for missing communities.  But that doesn’t make it an actual community.  When used in that way, it’s a pale imitation.

This definition comes from Andrew:

Q&A with the Public Professor – 1.4 Reinhardt: Yes, community is relative to size.  Since a community demands a basic level of familiarity and interaction among its members, there are limits to just how big it can grow, though an actual number would be impossible to come up with.  And there are certainly many, many small towns all across America that are well within the size range of a community.  But size isn’t the only defining element.  Membership, proximity, mutual obligations and responsibilities, value systems, and a veritable raft of rules on proper and improper behavior and ideals are also defining elements of thriving, functional community.  And by and large, today’s small American town have lost quite a bit of those elements.

Q&A With the Public Professor – 1.3 Reinhardt: People who live in communities, and they do exist in other parts of the world, have certain benefits that they often cherish.  A community can provide a sense of belonging and even help give purpose to life.  A community member is familiar with the people around them, as well as the expectations for how to behave and what to believe.  At the same time, however, Community rules and expectations can be restrictive.  Since a community demands a certain amount of loyalty and obedience, it tends to squelch assertive

Q&A With the Public Professor – 1.2 Reinhardt: The forces that led to the decline of American communities were complex, and the process took a long time to unfold.  For example, communities in the East were under

Q&A With the Public Professor – 1.1 Reinhardt: It’s no secret that over the last 15-20 years, political commentary in this country has become ever more partisan, but also increasingly vitriolic, manipulative, and at times downright nasty. And this applies to both sides of the political spectrum, whether you describe it as Liberal vs. Conservative, Left vs. Right, Democrat vs. Republican , or whatever labels you may care to use. On TV, radio, and the internet, commentators practically scream I’m a Historian, so perhaps it was natural that as I began to mull it over, I soon began thinking about how social issues, both large and small, used to get decided back in “the old days,” and what is different about that decision making process now? And that in turn led me to a whole mess of questions about how society is structured, how those structures worked in the past, and how they have changed over time. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that what was different now as opposed to centuries past, is that there are no more communities where such issues would get decided and enforced for and by the local population.