Anne Galloway debunks conventional thinking about the center of gravity in online community, and does so in a hypnotically reasoned fashion. As part of this seance, Anne has channeled a group of thinkers that I have somehow completely missed:

[from Anne Galloway | Purse Lip Square Jaw -- On community, trust and social software]

I've also been re-reading Alphonso Lingis' The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. I'm most interested in the idea that real value is found not in what we have in common, but in what makes us different. I like his discussions around being bound to someone - or something - that offers us no truth.

Anne's thinking has been formed by such different processes that it seems exotic, but a welcome shift of emphasis and purpose.

In Lingis' book Trust, he argues that the trust inherent in travel can show us how its value is found in experiences such as bravery, lust and joy. Contrary to the familiar trust between friends and family, on which most social software is modelled, Lingis passionately evokes this notion:

"Trust laughs at danger and leaps into the unknown."

Again, what makes this interesting is how much it differs from the idea that we form community along lines of similar or shared efforts. Instead, these kinds of community and trust revel in the unpredictable, the unexpected, the unknown, the irreconcilable. Their value is in what they teach us about things falling apart, about encountering and negotiating difference, about existence as difference and repetition, where repetition implies multiplication rather than preservation, about change. In these communities the sensual life prevails--and it is gloriously risky and difficult to control.

By defining community as something that requires we already know each other (by either one or six degrees of separation) and that we share interests, efforts or goals in common, and by committing these assumptions to architecture and code, we effectively deny people using these applications the ability to find community and trust in 'others,' and ultimately discourage people from changing, or becoming 'other' themselves. In this scenario, the radical promise of connection and cooperation between different people is undermined by conservative notions of connecting and cooperating only with people like us or, in some twisted expression of personal freedom, only with the people we choose.

Many have argued that this very tendency Anne is positioning against -- people's seemingly natural drift toward socializing with those they know, or those they have very strong affiliation already -- imbues the Internet with a profoundly conservative character. But the entropy of social stability and conservatism is countered by the wellsprings of spirit, that lead to almost irrational, impulsive interactions with those who are different, who are not the known, who are other than us. Anne suggests that any truly powerful social platform will have to allow us chance connections, random interactions, if it is to have any hope of matching the pulse and power of the larger, richer world. The alternative is to be blocked in by the dangerous simplicity of our tools.