On the question of community: blogs and belonging

To conclude I would like to introduce a “flesh and blood” blogger to illustrate how blogging might serve as a technological tool for facilitating new forms of social solidarity. The following is an extract from a blog post by a 33-year-old female Livejournal (a public blog service) user who lives in Melbourne:

my mum asked me tonight why i spent so much time on lj, and how did the comment thing work, and who can read my journal, and how well do i know them? and i explained how there was a friends-list and then random readers and lurkers, and she said, so only some of them are your friends, right? why do you bother spending time on the ones who aren't your friends?

… people have been so incredibly nice to me here on lj. ridiculously, hearrbreakingly, heartwarmingly nice. more than i think i'll ever deserve. i kind of expect that i must annoy some people... surely! but in the meantime i've had more love, support, understanding and time offered me than i can conceive. i said to my mother tonight, it's warm, and these women are the funniest, cleverest, brightest, most generous women i've ever met. it's safe there, and it's so warm, and it's kind, and it's just worth it. i can't explain more than that …

Although the concept of community is notoriously difficult to define and measure, it is difficult to deny that this example highlights the emotional connection and warmth one can find and experience within a “wired” social group. At first, the idea of accessing a community via the computer screen may seem cold and distant, but this lady's description of what Livejournal means to her suggests a genuine sharing, warmth and emotional connectivity within a group of like-minded people.

While I am careful to avoid a type of utopianism in constructing blogs as a techno-fix to social problems, I think it would be ignorant to ignore the fact that blogs and other forms of virtually-based communities are providing new ways of keeping warm in a highly individualised world.