Are online communes replacing online communities?
"Haven’t you noticed," Deragon writes, "that your real network is actually becoming smaller, regardless of how many followers and friends you think you have?”
Your followers and friends are catching on.
Goodbye community.
Hello commune.
Although the darlings of every new-media maven, online communities leave a lot to be desired. They're large, loose and transaction-oriented (often to the financial betterment of their facilitators).
By virtue of these qualities, online communities make it "impossible to hold true relational affinities."
Online communes, on the other hand, are small, tight and focused on the common interests of their members. They represent "a natural migration of human dynamics, where the membership is designed to have a higher degree of connectivity."
Because they only bring people together in order to fleece them, communities are old school. Deargon cites Internet guru Clay Shirky: “The problems of the past are being leveraged by organizations which have created solutions that preserve the old problems.“
