From the Salmon

These days, a lot of rental cars come with GPS navigation systems. I think that’s a perfect marriage of need and function. One of my favorite aspects of these systems is the calm way they inform you that you’ve missed your turn, even after they’ve given you an advance warning every 100 yards or so. When they have every right to ask “What, do you need me to turn the steering wheel for you, too?” the system tells you in a soothing, measured voice: “Recalculating your position.”

That’s in a sense what this post is. I launched into this series with a fairly minimal roadmap for where I wanted to go, and I think I’ve already overshot my mark a bit.

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the potential for this site and others like it in this interactive medium to become communities, inasmuch as they offer at their core the possibility of a vital, extended conversation. I also looked at some of the ways this conversation naturally breaks down.

I had a definite place I was going with all of this, but as I reconsidered that post throughout the day, the one question I kept coming back to is whether community is even possible in this setting.

On one level, it seems like quite a stretch to even think about using a word like that. Real community, much less one that could even be remotely described as “grace-filled,” requires its members to have a tangible presence in each other’s lives, a presence that almost certainly requires physical proximity. Right? I mean, a loose affiliation of glorified discussions can certainly be enjoyable and meaningful if you want it to be, but does it a community make? Or perhaps a more interesting question might be: can it a community make?

I think the most truthful answer I can give at this point is, simply, I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s an aspiration at best, something devoutly to be wished. Or maybe it’s enough that the discussions we have ripple out to affect those real communities that we are a part of.

Anyhow, I think I’m going to recalibrate my language a bit and take up the rest of that discussion soon. Instead of talking about what kind of community we want to be, I think I’ll talk more about what kind of people we want to be and how we can conduct our conversations in a way that avoids some of the natural pitfalls of this medium. And maybe the trajectory I talked about yesterday can point us toward transformative conversation, which is still a worthy destination.

(One more thing, as long as I’m rambling incoherently about semantics. I recognize that everyone has his or her own reasons for participating in a forum like this, and that it would be pretty presumptuous to say that I could speak for anyone but myself. So when I say things like ”we should be like X” or ”we should do Y,” please understand that I’m really talking about myself, but including an implicit invitation for you to join me on this journey.)

Okay. Enough babbling. More later.