Design for Community and the Super Friends

Design for Community

The web was revolutionary (and still is) because it does one thing that no other media has been able to do, ever. The web grows communities, almost without trying, because the web is the only media that allows its users to communicate with each other directly, publicly, and instantly.

Other media have glimmers of that connection, but none so successful or meaningful. Newspapers publish letters to the editor. Radio has call-in shows. Television has, well, Jerry Springer. All of these contain a hint of what is possible when you let users of your media communicate directly with each other. But the web makes direct user-to-user communication a reality. Because, on the web, the device you usually use to view it is the same device you need to create it.

Regarding blogging:

1. it is for yourself
   1. processing
   2. practice writing
   3. diary, personal history
2. public nature of it
   1. does not mean you need for punditry at all times
   2. just means it is a public record
   3. helps hone
   4. helps micro-communication between friends and acquaintances
   5. builds community within the same.

Members of a community will identify themselves with the community when they feel strongly connected to it. But slapping a community label on an unwitting individual will usually be met with annoyance or worse.

When I want to sell my old camera or buy a new book, I’ll visit sites such as eBay or Amazon. In these cases, I’m just there for a transaction, not a conversation. Yet both these sites have generous community features, and both brag about their communities to their stockholders and the press.

And while it’s true that some of eBay’s users feel strongly connected to the site, simply going there to sell my old stuff doesn’t really make me a community member, any more than using a can opener makes me a member of the exclusive can-opening community.

That was it. Sorry if it was anti-climatic, but I found it both illuminating and funny and I immediately thought of the Super Friends.¹

More regarding blogging: It therefore doesn’t matter if you have 5, 50, 500 or 5000 visitors a week. Such a numbers mentality is really missing the point (and not just IRT blogging, either). It is actually better to be small. Eventually, hopefully, the pure, the authentic, will win, and the pundit pledge drivers will be ignored into oblivion.