Part One: The Digital Community.
I wanted to share a story with you, especially this week, when there are so many things to trouble us about the way human beings treat one another. I have a happy and quite uplifting story to share. It seems especially important this week.
Nearly 30 years ago, when I was writing for Wired Magazine, and their new blog Hotwired, I became interested in the idea of the virtual community.
I have been writing about it and experimenting with it and seeking it ever since.
Louis Rosetto, then the founder and editor of Wired, and perhaps the greatest media visionary I have ever worked with, and I were both drawn to the idea of the virtual community. We talked about it all of the time. We would sometimes meet in San Francisco, and the conversations stirred me for months.
We wondered of people could gather on the Internet and forge a new kind of community, a digital community. We wondered if human values could cross the digital space.
By and large, our expectations were wrong, our dreams unrealized.
Our hopes were shattered many times – by the visceral hostility of the early geeks, by the cruelty and flaming online, by the corporate commercialization of the Internet, by the mob hysteria, trolling and hostility that sadly became the hallmark of early digital communications and the open spaces of the Internet, and now, so much of social media.
Every corporation online claims they really want to know what we think, but mostly, their public forums are just a subsidized form of hate speech.
The digital community has great promise online, but this now technology has enabled much rage, and cruelty, it is so easy and cheap to do.
Hostility is deeply ingrained in digital communities, from Amazon reviews to Reddit to SI.com, inundated with hate messages two weeks ago after publishing a story on Caitlin Jenner. Public comments on magazine and news websites are cesspools of rage and hatred. Blogs came into being a generation ago because they gave people a chance to moderate comments, but truly free speech rarely works online.
Several years ago, I formed an online community called the Open Group At Bedlam Farm, now called the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm. It was, from the first, a rocky and uncertain thing. I was not prepared. I forget that human beings are human beings, wherever they are, and no matter what technology they use. Being in a digital community does not erase the characteristics that mark people.
We are not a peaceful species. We argue and complain wherever we go.
I wondered if people who rarely, if ever, see one another could come to love and support each other in a meaningful way online. And nourish good work there. If so, that would be a revolutionary thing, especially for a community of creatives.
The group was engulfed in conflict almost from the beginning. People used to saying whatever they wanted online resisted even the few simple guidelines of the group, which was meant to be a creative sharing community – no hostility, no politics, no Facebook linking, just the sharing of creative work. They grieved for their dogs and cats, shared their most personal troubles, sought help for their psychological problems.
Many people were only too glad to help. Spiritual counselors appeared, eager to heal, even talk to the departed.
Several women told me they would never take direction from a man, they were feminists. I found some people were much more drawn to social interactions than creative works and were, in fact, able to attach across digital spaces to form powerful relationships. Sometimes too much so. People got intense, posted nasty comments and vanished, before anyone could reply. In a way, it was insane. In a way, it was inevitable.
When I posted messages urging more thoughtful feedback, some complained that they were being censored, several told me they no longer felt safe on the group. Some stormed out, leaving anguished manifestos and messages behind. This was not what I had dreamed of. When I said we were not a therapy group, that troubled and frightened people needed to get treatment from professionals, not from us, some were outraged, suggesting I was cruel or harsh.
We were not wanting the same things. I felt sometimes as if I were back in middle school.
Increasingly, the group was dominated by angry outbursts, seething manifestos, cliques, small cults, politics, gossip, back-door messaging groups, many small and private. We had drifted off center, I had permitted it to happen. Other people complained to me they felt excluded, ignored, “left out” of the community.
Of course, cliques, often inevitable, are community killers. They are, by definition exclusive. People around them feel left out, and are. This is also the reality of the online community, it is easy to love the other people more than the group itself. That is an ironic side affect, since it speaks to the success of community as well as it’s underside.
The somewhat utopian creative community I imagined was not utopian, it was very human, and quite ordinary, although it was often quite creative and engaged. It wasn’t that people didn’t do good work, but that good work was more and more besides the point. Everyone insisted they wanted to write a book, but hardly anyone did.
Or course, that is bound to happen when hundreds of strangers get together. The group attracted many gifted people.
But I felt my community slipping through my fingers. I didn’t sign up for all of this conflict, it felt like drama to me, not creativity. As I wrote one day, I felt as if I were back in middle school. And I didn’t like it there.
I am responsible for what happens on the group, good or bad. I started it, I have only myself to blame for those troubles. It was my expectations that were naive.
So it turned out that I was unhappy with my own creation, a virtual Dr. Frankenstein threatened with his own hubris and arrogance. I was responsible for it, but it was not what I intended.
I saw my decades old dream fraying at the edges, I was beginning to despair of the idea of the digital community, such a long and deeply held passion of mine. Some dreams do not come true.
I concluded that people were people, and that the presence of new and interactive nature didn’t alter the character of people – any group of three or more humans will quarrel and argue – there was no utopian ideal online. I decided I was naive, and ought to get back to writing for my blog and my books, I had no business community-building.
Part Two: Then life intervened.
The people who seemed so politicized and unhappy – in love with one another much more than the group – left one day to form their own group after much secret (not really) scheming and intrigued.
Most of the people I felt close to and supported by, stayed. The others – 40 or 50 – just vanished one night, they literally melted away, leaving in a silent and undeclared huff, not a one of them said goodbye to me but several left angry and dramatic manifestos behind.
It was a good decision on their part. Any community is somewhat a thing of trial and error, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Owning up to that shows character and strength.
But then, this strange thing. The group seemed to have self corrected itself. What was left – more than 240 people – was what I had dreamed of.
Suddenly, and without much thought or care, it seemed to become what I hoped it might become – warm, businesslike, creative, productive and intuitively supportive of one another. Suddenly, there were no quarrels, no resentments, no cliques, and I had very little to do with that beyond creating the group in the first place. The people who stayed, of course, understood what the group was and wanted to be there. They just got to work, and good work it was. Two books have already been published, a dozen awards won, more on the way.
I loved my group. Perhaps despite me, it had become what I hoped it would be, and mostly all on its own.
Perhaps that was the biggest lesson for me, and the biggest surprise: if you let people alone and encourage them, and they are the right people, they will find their own idea of community. In a sense, all you have to do is nothing. At least, most of the time.
Then a coming of age. A few weeks ago,one of the members of the group wrote me to say she had plagiarized some photos, and she was mortified and ashamed. She was leaving the group, she said she had betrayed me and the other members. And then she was gone.
I thought long and hard that day about what it meant to be in a community, and what it meant to be creative.
Creativity is not just about pretty photos and quilts and paintings. It is literally about being creative with your own psyche and values. About changing and opening up. This member – a warm and creative and gifted person – assumed the posture of the shamed, she just assumed me and the people in the group would drive her away and cast her out. She was about to throw herself in the trash, where she believed and had been told she belonged.
But that wasn’t, I thought, creative. Nor was it supportive and humane. It wasn’t what a real community would do. If I wanted a digital community, I couldn’t just say so, I had to help create one. Throwing her into the trash wasn’t what I wanted to do. I contacted her and asked her to stay. She said she was surprised to hear from, and mortified. She admitted her mistakes openly. She was seeing a professional therapist to understand why she had done what she had done, she couldn’t explain it. Good enough for me.
She wrote a beautiful and honest piece about it.
I wrote about her and her agony on the group, and I was moved to tears when almost every single member posted in support of her, asked her to stay, offered their hands to her in support and encouragement. We were all coming from the same place, a place of the heart. Suddenly, we had become a real community. It had happened, in that moment.
We all seemed to realize at the same time that this was a chance to define what it meant to be in a community, what support really was. And what it meant to be creative, rather than angry, judgmental or self-righteous.
Our member is reborn, she has already contributed a wonderful piece of writing and a beautiful photo to the group, and is recovering from her disturbing journey. She will share what she learns with us if she wishes, and we all agreed that no apologies were necessary. Nobody was looking for blood.
She just needed to move forward and take our hands. She did, she stayed with us, and we were all happy.
She showed us how brave and loving she is, she showed us how much more creative she is than the work she was copying. Human beings screw up – all of us – and people who plagiarize can be wonderful people, well worth saving and keeping. I have learned so much from the group, far more than I have taught. That is a valuable lesson in itself.
And we saved her, a member of our community, in a very important way, from the destruction of her creative self. You did not betray me, I told her, you betrayed yourself. This is just a chapter, not the whole story. Anybody can make a mistake, I have done worse, but not everyone can deal with it so well and bravely. You just have to own it and move on. Wasn’t this the very essence of community? I had not seen it myself so clearly before.
As a group, we also suddenly and powerfully realized what we were about, what a true community is, we found it together, all of us at once, through this talented but temporarily stricken member. We were defined, we have come together. We came of age. Communities don’t throw people in the trash, they help pick them up when they stumble, if they can be picked up.
I do not expect perfection or utopia. We are human, we will have our troubles. But we have connected in a powerful way, and I believe we will endure. It just took a few decades. The idea of the community is the same, it is me that has grown.
I am overjoyed at the resurrection of the idea of a virtual community that is positive, productive and created. Louis and I were onto something, I wish he could see it, I will try and track him down, he roams the world, the freest of spirits. We didn’t create or invent the idea, but we loved and nurtured it. A supportive community, a place of encouragement, not judgment.
Great work is busting out all over the group, in many different forms.
But the rebirth of our troubled friend and member was our greatest and most creative work so far
