Community

Community is a much-used term in communication research and theorizing, occurring in a variety of everyday senses and as a central concept in several intellectual traditions. As an ordinary term in speech and writing, community has (at least) five different meanings. A first and one of the most common ones, community1, is to equate the term with the set of people who inhabit a certain geographic place. In this meaning, community is a geographic unit bigger than family and neighborhood but smaller than the state, region, or nation. Community 1 is the name for the people who live in local units such as cities, towns, and school districts (e.g., the Denver community).

A second meaning, community2, is as a term of reference for a discrete set of people who share a culturally marked identity. In the United States, media frequently make claims about the gay or older community, the Hmong or Latino community, the Muslim or Jewish community, and so on. In this second use, community is a synonym for identity groups. Community 2 is regularly used to refer to the groups that the larger society has marginalized or stigmatized in some way. Related to this second meaning is a third one, community3 which treats community as a set of people who share an interest or activity (e.g., the snowboarding community, the Facebook community, the vegan community).

Community's fourth meaning, community4, is as a positive sentiment that may be enacted, accomplished, pursued, or endangered. An aim of most groups and organizations, whether they exist face-to-face or virtually, online, is to establish a “sense of community” among participants. Groups that succeed in building community are ones that through their communication have created a sense of caring and connection among the participants.

[Page 144]The last everyday meaning for community, community5, is as a pole in two pairs of political values that both depend on and are in tension with each other. Within this meaning, commitment to the well-being of a group (community) is contrasted with a valuing of individual rights. Here, the needs and demands of people living together with bonds of connection and mutual responsibility, community5, are contrasted with the impersonal, more minimalist rights of society.

These ordinary meanings of community complement as well as contradict each other. Community as a place, an identity, and an interest often come together, and when they intersect, the focal community frequently pursues community as a desired sentiment. At the same time, the demands of community1 and community5 (the social needs of a geographic-based group) may conflict with the needs or wants of identity or interest groups (community2 and community3). These ordinary meanings of community are to be found in many corners of communication scholarship. Communication Yearbook 28, a handbook of review articles, made community an organizing concept for 2004. The titles of the articles in this yearbook reflected the multiple meanings of community. Consider but three: “Communication in the Community of Sport,” “Meetings: Discursive Sites for Building and Fragmenting Community,” and “Ideal Collaboration: A Conceptual Framework of Community Collaboration.”

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