Blog / Collaborative consumerism - Creating an offline community online (part 1).

27th September

The idea of community has almost become synonymous with the internet. The internet apparently has no bounds in its ability to form relationships and connections with people. It allows us to keep up-to-date with our friends, make new friends, connect with like-minded groups, and join networks to enhance our business reputation to name just a few. Perhaps the defining factor that makes the internet so powerful at facilitating community is its ability to transcend location. No longer do we have to be in the same town or even country to create connections with other people. All we need to do is go online and its there for the taking.

Or is it?

I have to say I sometimes struggle with the idea of online community. That doesn’t mean that I think that the internet isn’t an amazing tool for enabling social interactions. On the contrary without web applications like Facebook and Twitter, how would we know what are friends are doing on a day-to-day basis? Without Gowala and Foursquare, how would we know what places they have visited?

Ok so you might have sensed a slight touch of sarcasm in my tone, but really I do believe these applications do have a place in building a type of community.

The social web fails to fulfil the real physical human interaction that helps to bind and build real life communities. Now I realise that some online communities have meet-ups and social occasions that allow members to socialise with each other but a real community is much more than just a series of monthly meet ups. I believe a real community is about how we interact and work with the people we live close to and places we live in.

Members of real life communities are naturally tied by the location in which they live and it’s this common factor that binds them together. It’s an interesting fact that location is such a key feature in both online communities and real life communities. However it is clear that they are at contradicting sides of the pole. There is no restriction on location with online communities allowing it to be open to everyone, but in real life, it’s our relationship to the location in which we live that allows us to be part of a community by default.

It’s this connection that gives real life communities a much greater potential to share with our adopted communities and help shape the environment in which we live.

So is it possible to create a real ‘offline’ community online? The answer is definitely yes, but focus needs to be applied to specific locations. Enter ‘Collaborative Consumerism’ the internets answer to traditional sharing, renting, bartering, trading, and swapping.