Sunday New York Times Magazine on food and community

A week or two ago Malcolm Gladwell had a piece in the New Yorker about the web and community and activism and he avers that activism isn't aided in significant ways through social media technologies. See "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted."

Note that if you do a google search, you'll find that there is a lot of oppositional response.

I think this is somewhat true, although like most anything, it's bi-modal--some activism is aided by such technologies in significant ways (cf. "democratic centralism" and the Russian Revolution) while for most people with weak ties, they can "be involved" without doing anything.

It's like blogging. I have met and interact with people in significant ways through the blog, sometimes in analog ways (in person), other times digitally, but because I do things in the world outside of blogging, some of the connections come through doing things, not just writing about them. E.g., Aaron Renn of the Urbanophile is in town to present at a conference today. We couldn't get together last night, but we talked on the phone for an hour. (I met him, with Lynn Stevens of Peopling Places, the last time I was in Chicago, and Lynn took us around Logan Square.)

When I first read Eric Raymond's original essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar (later expanded into a book--I read it in 2002, it came out in 2000), about the organizing of open source software communities, I was struck by the relevance of his arguments to community organization, organizing, and participatory democracy. (Hence my crack above about revolutionary "democratic centralism".) You have to have leaders. You have to have people like Linus Torvalds serving as the "chief software architect" or manager, because it's very difficult for bottom up chaos to result in practical change.

So, getting to community, in the neighborhood where I live, we don't know many people. But the people who have dogs and walk them, and children and "walk them" too, or take them on strolls, end up meeting more people, because the dogs and the children provide the opportunity for what Anne Lusk calls "social bridges" and what William Whyte called "triangulation" -- the opportunity for people who don't necessarily know each other to meet and/or strike up a conversation.

Triangulation - process by which some external stimulus provides social linkage between people and prompts strangers to interact e.g. unexpected nature of street acts or public sculpture.

The stories in the New York Times Magazine special issue on food start with a discussion of food and community ("Collaborative Consumption:The Cow-munity") and again, the local food movement, just like blogs, or children, or dogs, provide the opportunities for people to build and make communities that may or may not transcend specific places.

This is particularly important for "old places," because during the days when sprawl was at its height, and new subdivisions were built and inhabited over short periods of time, people had reason to come together in more focused ways.

This is one reason why studies of community engagement tend to show higher connections in suburbs over center cities, although part of the issue has to do with what we might call "age of the community" and household type.