stimulant

I’ve been reading Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and coming across a number of good tidbits that seem to be germinating.

In particular (emphasis mine),

Jane Jacob’s monumental work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, […] celebrated the creativity and diversity of urban neighborhoods like her own Greenwich Village. Whereas Whyte found conformity and homoegeneity, Jacob’s neighborhoods were veritable fountainheads of individuality, difference and social interaction. The miracle of places, she argued, was found in the hurly-burly life of the street. The street, where many different kinds of people came together, was both a source of civility and a font for creativity. […] What made Hudson Street work was its combination of physical and social environments. It had short blocks that generated the greatest variety of foot traffic. It had a diversity of people […] It had wide sidewalks and a tremendous variety of buildings […] Hudson Street also fostered and attracted a certain type of person — Jacob’s all important “public characters” — shopkeepers, merchants, and neighborhood leaders […]. [They] played a critical role in resource mobilization, […] utiliz[ing] their position in social networks to connect people and ideas.

Now, I’m not quite ready to get behind the statement that public characters’ importance is a consequence of “their position in social networks [being used] to connect people and ideas,” but this idea of community having a necessarily public character dovetails nicely with a conversation Jesse and I had a few nights ago wherein he asked me what I thought of all the attention the issue of privacy has been garnering. We didn’t delve into the issue too deeply, but agreed that privacy was disappearing, and that it wasn’t coming back: the nature of community was going to need to change. Privacy used to be an implicit issue of expectations — you expected that a certain class of information would be unavailable, or at least obscure, to most of the world. Increasingly, privacy is becoming an explicit issue: if you don’t want people to know something, you need to go out of your way to protect it. Shifting this default, moving privacy from a passive to an active component of public life, has generated a lot of the concern about the decline of privacy. Particularly as this issue has gone unacknowledged, it wasn’t (and isn’t) clear to many people what it means to take an active interest in their privacy.

What I find exciting about this connection between publicity and community¹ is that openness is being foisted upon us, and I think that for people to make peace with the privacy issue (as well as to take advantage of all the real potential the internet offers), we’re going to have to redefine what we think of as our community. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we’ll need to build and join communities more seriously, elevating our online experience to that of our corporeal one. While anonymity will always be an option with the internet, it will increasingly be a necessarily active choice (c.f. privacy’s shift).

I’m not entirely sure what the endpoint of this thinking about the role of publicity and openness in community building is, but it’s happening. Hopefully, there’s something to exploit here [in building the communities I want to see].

1. Note: when I use the word “community,” it is not in its broadest sense of “a collection of people,” I’m trying to capture the unique, rare, affective construction of a group of people with a collective self-interest. [↩]