[Air-l] Community and our Conceptual Lexicon

[Ellis Godard]

Ian Goodwin wrote:
> ...community has always been tied to normative
> prescription as well as empirical description. Yet the most 
> important point about community is that it pervades everyday 
> life. I'd go so far as to say it seems to be indispensable to 
> social discourse.

That's pretty far.

> Thus, as Peter  Hamilton put it in his
> perceptive introduction to Cohen's (1985) classic study (The 
> Symbolic Construction of Community), community would have 
> long ago been "discounted as grist to the scholarly mill were 
> it not for the remarkable hold that the idea of community 
> exerts over both the intellectual and popular mind" (p.7).

The popularity of a notion, within or beyond scholarship, is a poor criteria for the evaluation of its use in describing anything other than its popularity.
  
> It is for this reason we should be careful about discounting
> community. People manifestly believe in community and use the 
> term in their everyday discourse. In this sense community 
> motivates, sustains, and structures social action.

By what logic does the publicly consequential nature of a term render it having descriptive or explanatory value?

> ...For example fears of 'community decline', whilst
> difficult if not impossible to verify from an objective 
> perspective, often motivate residents of localities to become 
> involved in online initiatives (and structure how they then 
> interact online - the topics they deem 'relevant', the goals 
> of the online group etc) - this was certainly the case in the 
> community informatics initiatives I studied in Birmingham (UK). 

Fears of goblins do not goblins make.

-eg