Community

A community is an amalgamation of living things that share an environment. The individual living beings can be plant or animal; any species; any size. What characterizes a community is sharing and interaction in any number of ways. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs and a multitude of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the degree of adhesion within the mixture, but the definitive driver of community is that all individual subjects in the mix have something in common. This is even true in biological communities.

The sense of community

Continuity of the connections between leaders and leaders, leaders and followers, followers and followers is vital to the strength of a community. Members, both leaders and followers, individually hold the collective personality of the whole. With sustained connections and continued conversations, participants in communities regardless of degrees of inclusion develop emotional bonds, intellectual pathways, enhanced linguistic abilities, and even a higher capacity for critical thinking and problem-solving. It could be argued that successive and sustained contact with other humans might help to remove some of the tensions of isolation due to disenfranchisement thus opening creative avenues that would have otherwise remained impassable. Conversely, sustained involvement might tend to aggravate tensions in some individuals. But is most likely easy enough to distance one's self from the hive temporarily to ease this stress. In fact psychological maturity and effective communication skills may well be a function of this ability. In nearly every context, individual and collective behaviours are required to find a balance between inclusion and exclusion for the individual - a matter of choice; for the group - a matter of charter. The sum of the creative energy and the strength of the mechanisms that maintain this balance is manifest as an observable and resilient sense of community.

Related Topics:
Conversation - Disenfranchisement

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~