Not Community; Identity

It crossed my mind that what I'm looking for in a mediated experience isn't exactly a sense of community; instead it's a sense of shared identity: that the people in the mediated experience are, in some sense, part of me; that we share a common identity.

The word community, on the other hand, has specific meanings in the physical world, but is a very vague term when applied to online experiences. Naively, I think of shared identity as one element of a community, and that a community implies support, intimacy, trust, recognizable individuals, continuity of relationships, etc. In contrast, I think (again Naively) of shared identity as simply defining an "us" vs. the world of "them".

This is a useful distinction, because I believe a sense of group identity can be established and communicated far more easily than a sense of community can.

The Loneliness of Shadows

An accidental experiment has given me the impression that seeing shadows - at least anonymous shadows - may not be a very reassuring an experience.

We were at the JFK airport the other day, and in the course of navigating the rabbit warren of security tunnels, we wound up in a waiting area where we could see the shadows of people passing by outside.

Far from being the reassuring experience I had expected, seeing the shadows enhanced the airport's feeling of isolation and loneliness.

Granted, this experience was within the context of the general jet lag, dehydration, and paranoia that typifies air travel, but I think the experience is still valid: the anonymous shadows (as you might see in the Flickering Lights idea in an earlier blog) didn't provide a warm, fuzzy feeling at all.

I feel a big part of the problem was that the shadows were anonymous - the people represented by the shadows were not recognizably part of my community. This leads to a design rule:

Design Rule: evidence of people in a mediated experience should be associatable with your community. This doesn't necessarily mean that the user should recognize who the people are, but it does mean that the user should recognize that the people are part of their community vs. the general population.

For example, if I were part of a baseball team and a few of the shadows passing by were wearing baseball caps and carrying our team duffle bags, the shadows might have been reassuring.