Roundabout Thoughts on Communities and Codes of Conduct

Abstract

A reflection on Neil Postman's 1998 observation about how the Internet changed the meaning of the word community from a group of people joined by location who may not have anything in common to a group of people networking together because of a shared interest. I thought about it in terms of massive social media networks out of anyone's control, and small special interest chat servers. I considered how the creation of codes of conduct within these new-kinds-of-communities are an attempt to work our way back to that old-kind-of-community.