Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Individualism in communities

At a Unicom conference a while back I wasn’t amazed to hear that ‘networked individualism’ was to be the next thing, and perhaps ‘Community’ was being shown the door (too much like hard work on the whole, and, perhaps big corporations trying to emulate ‘Community’ is a bit weird?).

Dave Snowden brought something similar up a recent post (not related to the moment above) saying:

In effect most of the material I read in articles and the blogosphere, and most the presentations I witness at conferences fit within the dominant atomistic assumptions of anglo saxon tradition: the individual is seen as primary, with communities understood as aggregations of individual self-interest and needs.

His observation (taken out of context) is accurate and I concur. For example, think about how ‘online community facilitators’ try to motivate people to make contributions to communities - it’s always to their benefit as individuals - when it could be to the benefit of the group as a whole (but that is a much harder sell and may not be suitable at the early stages of building a group).

In a different context, most advanced climbers will happily take time out of their climbing to introduce newbies to the sport; it’s just part of the system. I believe they do it because having more climbers makes ‘climbing’ better, period. It’s not strictly to their individual benefit.

Anyway - here’s an example I saw in action last night waiting for a take away pizza:

Here’s my bicycle propped up by the restaurant door:

I didn’t know that I had left my lights turned on. A couple walked out, and one of them, noticing the lights were on, stopped and turned them off (thanks for that by the way). She didn’t know who the bike belonged to, it made no difference to her, so why did she do it?

Perhaps because it was the decent thing to do, and benefited the community as a whole?

OK it’s not exactly a scientific observation and I’m sure all the ethnographers and psychologists out there would boot my piffling theory around, but it struck a chord with me.

There is no obvious causal relationship between her action and individual self-interest.