What is the community?

Community can be generally defined as things that consist of homogeneous groups. Homogeneous groups are groups consist of people who have same backgrounds such as culture, language, and religion, etc. Communities have played a role that encourages people in the community to cooperative each other and protect them socially. However, communities have facilitated exclusiveness in the society and promote reject people living in other societies. These features actually are keeping originalities of each community.

I divide types of communities into two main categories: traditional communities and modern ones. A former type is age-old communities existing in agricultural villages or ethnic societies, which are categorized as traditional and highly homogeneous societies. A later one is communities that appeared or are appearing in modern society like global communities or virtual communities.

Typical traditional communities are territorial connections and blood relationships. Considering the past time, most people hardly moved but stayed their communities until they died (even present age, many people mostly spend their lives in their communities). They share common knowledge, information, culture, concepts, experiences, and history under traditional communities. Under their communities, people are strongly protected at the social end while they are subject to restrictions. For example, members in the community have to participate in some events or keep the rules in their community. They can get social securities in exchange for losing their freedom.

On the other hand, modern communities are comparatively a new concept and consist of broader areas, fields, or more various types of people than traditional ones. Typical modern communities are global communities and virtual ones. There are significant differences between traditional communities and modern ones: modern communities do not require community members to share same backgrounds such as culture, history, or language, and members in communities often do not know about other members well.

Global communities are organized among regions or countries sharing common interests. For example, European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are typical global communities, and share common interests with different backgrounds. Although, in many cases, members of global communities have similar culture and concepts, they do not have to share same ones. However, members in global communities are required to keep the rules of their communities to obtain social securities as well as traditional communities. Global communities can also get into the category of traditional ones in that way.

Virtual communities are called e-community or online community, and composed of people who know each other through the Internet. Most members have never seen each other or do not know any information about other members, but connect in same interests or hobbies. It does not matter if members have quite different backgrounds such as languages, cultures, or concepts, since they connect by common hobbies or interests. Therefore, connection among members in virtual communities often tends to weak, because it is hard for them to achieve unities with strangers. A virtual communities’ feature that other three do not have is virtual communities do not guarantee social securities for members.

Communities have been staying around as a basic function in societies since human history started and its meanings are expanding after reaching modern age. However, in terms of a function that homogeneous groups gather, an essence of communities never changes.