community is a group of people bound by something held in common — a place, an interest, an identity, or a practice — together with the fellowship and mutual obligation that shared ground creates.
The word entered English in the late fourteenth century from Old French comunité, from Latin communitas, "fellowship, society," built on communis, "common." Its earliest English senses already spanned the range it carries today: people living in the same locality, the common people as distinct from their rulers, joint possession of something, and an association of persons with shared interests or occupations. Modern usage leans hardest on the last of these, so a community can be a neighborhood, a profession, a congregation, or an online forum whose members have never met.
Community sits between the intimacy of 📝family and the abstraction of society. Family is given, rests on kinship, and is organized around the unequal relationship of parent and child; community is chosen or shared, and at its best is organized among peers. It also differs from an audience, which gathers around a single source and relates mainly to it, in that the members of a community relate to one another. Business has borrowed the word heavily — 📝Community-Led companies treat users as co-creators rather than customers — and the 📝Network State proposes that an online community with a shared culture can become the seed of a polity. The field's terms of art are collected in the 📝Community Glossary.
“By nature, man seems adapted to live in communities of a very moderate size; his economic life has compelled him to live in eve—enlarging ones. Many of the damaging effects of family life described by modern psychologists may be the result of our attempt to make the family group satisfy psychological needs which can only be satisfied by the community group. The family is based on inequality, the parent-child relationship; the community is, or should be, based on equality, the relationship of free citizens. We need both.” ~ W. H. Auden, My Belief, 📝Essays of the Masters
Community is where much of my work lands. 📝Ghost Influence grew a community of more than 20,000 members, 📝My Office Hours are an open invitation to anyone building authentic growth in theirs, and 📝Narrative Immunity names what lets a community hold its coherence after rupture. The Power of Communities Episode is on my listening list.