The Illusion of #Community

Anna Maria Michael 2020

A critical investigation into the way digital media and networked culture give shape and encompass representation of shared socially constructed concepts, such as “community”.

“When you’re on Facebook, Facebook is the laws of nature, the force that creates its own ecosystem and determines its workings. It gets to send floods, bring droughts, strike down users and strip-mine their information, decide which community is targeted with what. It can build tools to censor the content a nation like China might wish to censor, and systems that suppress — or fail to suppress — content stoking ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. These powers aren’t jointly held; they’re entirely private. They eat away at the very thing that makes community worthwhile, until they’ve created something that’s not a community at all, but a simulation of one, a game with one winner and a community of losers.”
Carina Chocano, What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?, The New York Times