*Can* you build community online?
A green sticker that reads “Love Wins” on the edge of a laptop, with a grubby keyboard and a few pages of notes below.
Hello Lovely.
When I think of my formative experience of being in community I think of a campfire, a church basement, a sun room, a dirt road, a snow hut.
What strikes me about that list is the physicality of it all — the ember burning through my hoodie, the smell of the big percolator, the blue plates.
None of these moments was made of pixels. None of them had to bounce off satellites to get to me.
I never had to ask, “Is my mic on?” or quietly wonder if someone was checking their email while I was talking.
~
Evolutionary biologists will tell you that humans have been gathering for about 2 million years, which is when we learned to hunt, and started to really need each other. My gut says that we were probably gazing at stars elbow to elbow for much longer than that, but I have no idea.
It’s the number that stays with me — two million years. We had all that time to track eye contact and breathing and shoulder touches, to learn to co-regulate, to shuttle micro-signals of belonging back and forth for generation after generation after generation.
We weren’t perfect at it, but we were very, very practiced.
~
And then into all that learning came the Internet. This was 20-30 years or 0.0015% as much time.
The Internet is — bafflingly — where we mostly connect now.
No eye contact.
No soft sounds of inhales and exhales to track like the tide.
No elbows brushing under a sky full of stars.
~
How could we not have whiplash?
How could we not be blinking, wild-eyed, wondering what we’ve lost?
I started asking myself that question newly last year, when we had the idea to create a membership program for writers, but we didn’t want to just make more noise.
I dipped into a lot of online communities, and figured out a few things.
Generosity is key. Host with great care.
Don’t recreate what’s already out there — the Internet is a place where you can make things that have existed.
Listen, listen, listen. Build from there.
Love your people.
It’s amazing to me how many online forums feel salesy and coercive, as if social media set the atmosphere for online connection, and not everyone has remembered that they don’t need to follow. I’ve loved finding and making something different. It’s been humbling for me to feel how much genuine connection happens in these spaces.
As for ours, Fireside, I already can’t imagine my life without it. A while ago, after I took a week off, one of the members said “Welcome Home” and it felt… true.
~
After all this, I’m not a tech optimist or pessimist, but I am evolving into tech-curious.
A tech let’s-see-ist. A tech-experimentalist. I love what we’ve made online, and I also love campfires. I need to have the space in my days to hold both.
Everything is changing, always.
It’s a mistake to think that the future needs to look like the past. Maybe my niece’s formative experiences of community will be the adrenaline she felt before her improv troop hit the Zoom screen, or the sudden joy of feeling a new message arrive on an app I can’t even imagine.
I just know I want to keep connecting in the ways I can, and to be curious about all I don’t know. You can count on me to be there, trying new things, holding the door open.
In it with you,
