During Mix 07, I sat in on an interview between Robbie Bach and Darryl Taft of eWeek. It was a good interview that covered a lot of ground. One part in particular leaped out at me because it's been something I've been thinking about. In response to a question about Zune and community, Robbie said:
"More generally, we think about community as a place where people to go create their social network. And I'll be a psychologist for a moment here. I think the tensions and pressures of the world today, the pace with which we work, the pace with which things happen, the degree to which people move around, your social fabric just isn't very strong. It's not like you grew up in Appleton, Wisc., you went to school, you come back to Appleton, Wisc., you take your dad's business there, and that was 30 years ago. That doesn't happen anymore. In that old world your community was the neighborhood you grew up with, it's the friends you went to church with, it's the kids of your parents' friends.
In the new world your community is all over the country, and it's your friend from high school who went to a different college, it's the friend who moved away, it's the person who my son plays on an AU basketball team with and has a bunch of friends who don't go to his school and don't live in his community.
And yet we have a strong desire to have community and to have social connections. So, what do we do? We use technology to create it. That's what MySpace is about. That's what Xbox Live is about. It's what the Zune social experience will be about. But you're going to see that continue to expand."
Of course, the degradation of community in the real world has been a topic for a long time, and has spawned some interesting books like "Bowling Alone." But I'd been thinking about it in context of Dare's post on comment quality, and wondering if as we step away from community at some level in reality and more in to community online, are we making a good trade? Then, in the panel discussion about marketing, Anil Dash asked a question about advertising and respect for the user, noting that in many cases the sites he was on showed an active contempt for him. I think we've all experienced this, either through bad advertising, negative comments, bad design even. Then, in talking with Anil after the keynote we looped back to the controversy regarding the attack comments and Kathy Sierra, a very cogent reminder that we're all still living in the Wild West and evolving our accepted norms as we move along.
So, are we making a bad for worse trade? Losing our community in the real world and stepping into a place where the community is equally frayed and at times downright anti-social? While I'm worried, I don't think so. The desire to connect, to be social, is a core part of what defines us as humans. The online world today is the latest frontier, where rules of engagement, norms of acceptable behavior and relationship nuances are being hashed out in real time. We'll get there, and if we're very lucky, the act of improving community and connection online will help us do better in the real world as well.
Color me hopeful.