The Banana Peel Project

I woke up on the Green Tortoise at sunrise this morning as it swam through commuter traffic over the Bay Bridge. I had just spent a long weekend in Death Valley with thirty new friends hiking through marble canyons and soaking in salty hot springs. As I looked around the bus, its riders awkwardly crawled out of their dusty sleeping bags and I realized that the past three days had given me a new understanding of what it means to be engaged in a community.

The concept of community is central to communication theory. A community, as any business consultant, psychology undergraduate, or organizational theorist will tell you, is a complex informational network made up of individuals, but whose aggregate behavior bears no relation to the singular behaviors of its constituent parts. A community can define itself in any number of ways — shared experiences, shared perspectives, shared enemies, or even just shared physical location. The key, as you might guess, is the fact that a community is about sharing.

But this post isn’t about the definition of community. It’s about the experience of being part of an intensely intimate community that comes together on a bus, lives and hikes and eats and breathes together for three days, and then suddenly disperses into the morning fog at the San Francisco Transbay Terminal. I witnessed — and was a part of — the process by which thirty strangers from all over the planet came together and, three days later, were literally brought to tears by the pain of the inevitable separation. Three days in the desert were enough for thirty people to make friends, lose friends, and fall in love.

Here is where I’m going: I think that to be a part of a powerfully efficient and open community is to embrace a new kind of technology, one that extends much more than your feet or your hands or your eyes. The communication channels within effective communities are extensions of your own thoughts, and the group becomes synonymous with the collective, emergent goals of the individuals that comprise it. That experience is so powerful that once it is taken away, no matter how fleeting the community may have been, it can feel as if a part of yourself has been physically amputated. Again, McLuhan.

These are only some of my initial, and admittedly undeveloped, thoughts on the relationship between engagement with technology and participation in a community. Hopefully the concepts and metaphors will straighten themselves out a bit more as I think and read more. I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks — especially those readers who have had experiences in powerful internet communities, social clubs, religious groups, or Burning Man.

I haven’t slept much at all in the last few days, and I don’t plan to be doing much more in the next few days as I once again head for San Diego.

To come: more on communities, TAZs, and video games.

[the banana peel project]