Internet Meetups and Community
Rural Pennsylvania: After driving two hundred miles, a woman steps out of her car in the driveway of a bed and breakfast. A dozen other women leap up from the porch the house, shouting "Heather, Heather!" They all rush to each other and exchange hugs. Heather has never seen these people before. Heather and the other women are members of an online forum for people who enjoy scrapbooking. Occasionally the members of the message board organize get-togethers they call "crops," which serve as weekend-long scrapbooking sessions and parties.
Heather and the other scrapbook forum members are not the only groups of people who meet up as a consequence of interactions on websites. Members of many websites that have forums or comment sections organize get-togethers, most commonly called meetups, with other members. Some of these get-togethers bring together people from across the country, but many are casual local affairs.
These gatherings run against a trend observed by Robert Putnam and others that participation in community organizations – bowling leagues, PTAs, VFW, Kiwanis – is declining across America. Participation in this type of organization may indeed be slipping, but at least some people are participating in something else. The website meetups are as rich for their participants as the activities described by Putnam; they produce social capital among their members, and are ultimately an example of the ways in which the Internet enhances or even becomes community. The ties formed between website members and meetup participants can fit within a definition of community proposed by Wellman: “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity. I do not limit my thinking about community to neighbourhoods and villages.” Separation of the idea of community from physically bounded neighborhoods and towns is also consistent with Wellman's idea of a "liberated community" and emerging models of network sociality and elective sociality, in which people are held together in social networks by their personal choices rather than pre-given relationships such as location or interest.
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