Understanding Which Communities You Belong To

We see a lot of colleges/universities as the “Community” Question – Tell us about a community you belong to and what is your role within it. For those of you in need of answering this question, here is an interesting read on The New York Times referring to this topic. The article defines clients as “Actual communities in which people know each other, do things for each other.” Here is a tid-bit…

Draining the Life From ‘Community’

NEW YORK — If you don’t belong to a community these days, you’re really on your own. But never fear. “Community” has become one of those words that should always have quotation marks around it. Words get hijacked all the time, but this is one of those really violent, eight-country, stop-for-refueling hijackings.

Actual communities in which people know each other, do things for each other and act in concert may be on the decline. But new meanings of community are rushing to fill the void.

In U.S. government-speak, there’s the “intelligence community,” which every crisis reveals to be not much of a community at all. There’s a “scientific community,” but they quarrel over citations like toddlers. There’s the “European Community”; you know how that’s going. In Silicon Valley, there is a “developer community” of headphones-wearing techies who speak to no one and play video games alone. There’s a “business community,” whose members seek to put each other out of business. Entire races are called “communities,” however gaping their internal divisions. The religious, who always seem to be emerging from or heading into a schism, belong to the monolithic “faith community.”

For more information about this article visit the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/draining-the-life-from-community.html?pagewanted=all