Community building

Bowling alone by Robert Putnam is primarily summarized as our disengagement from the involvement in our communities. Putnam describes to the reader a decline in the civic engagement initially through our politics, particularly in the decline in “turnout [of] national elections over the last three decades,” “attendance [of] a public meeting on town or school affairs,” and “attending a political rally or speech, serving on a committee of some local organization, and working for a political party.”…

Findings Layout of the Forum Discord is set up so that the creation of individual communities is possible. In order to start a community, a server is created. This is the community with the largest number of people. The server used by this community, for instance, was labeled the ‘No Chill Zone’, as a satyrical reference to a pop phrase used on the internet (“_____ has no chill.”). Within the server, there are text channels. These include pictures, text, and video. Voice channels are…

Turkles Alone Together, she exemplifies her worry for online social networking sites because of their ability to allow humans to edit themselves and manage their relationships (2011). Throughout my interaction with the IMVU community, I found that numerous people using online communities to build relationships were looking for a way out of their past imperfect ones. They loved being able to communicate when they felt like it and return to the real world where the relationship no longer affected…

Service learning is a reciprocal relationship between students and communities1; the focus is on enhancing the learning of all involved: the student, the teacher and the community, all of whom learn something from each other2. Students’ exposure to real life situations outside the classroom allows for application of theory as well as a prime opportunity for the student to work one on one in settings that are non contrived. This allows the student to develop and hone problem solving and critical…

Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. INTRODUCTION In Cultivating Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder write about the way of sharing and applying knowledge across the usual boundaries of organizations. They call it communities of practice, which come together around particular interests and ideas. This book identifies practical principles for starting and developing these…

As the phenomena of social media has swept the world in the past decade, it has become an outlet for all ages. Although social media was thought to be aimed for teenagers and young adults, people of all ages have now become a part of the social movement. Social media was previously limited to a few websites such Myspace and Facebook; now, it has expanded to have hundreds of different outlets of communication, now including smartphones applications as well. Because social media has become such a…

Better Together: A Civic Nation at Risk Americans have long prided themselves on being exceptionally civic-minded; however, in recent history Americans have started to withdraw from one another. A nation once rich in social capital, is now a nation struggling to return to a former self. A bigger problem at play here, is the fact that most Americans are unaware of their withdrawal from one another. America needs to put an emphasis on the recreation of social capital. America’s long reign as…

Bowling Alone focuses on the decrease in civic engagement of American society and provides detailed examples and data as to why civic engagement such as voter turnout and “secondary association” involvement is decreasing. Putman attributes this decrease to demographic transformations by means of changing from “the corner grocery store” to the supermarket and even to electronic shopping. With a change like this there is less interaction while buying goods at the supermarket to almost no…

Many would say that teens are “the future of tomorrow” where thanks to what they learn, it will impact them and the future of society. It is with that knowledge that, when we see many teenagers on their phone using some kind of social media, we worry for the future of America. A justifiable worry as 95% of teenagers in the United States currently go online and 80% of them partake in some type of social media. (Cookingham and Ryan 2). Teens make up a large portion of the most famous social…

through trust and probably have a long history of favors that were returned throughout the years.A great example of a public social capital is a community block watch program because it…