Introduction: Augmented Community

As the Town Lives on within the City

In 1887, Ferdinand Tonnies wrote about what he saw as a major change in social groupings from organic community to purposive society.  Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft, or community, described naturally occurring social order that could be found in the family or small town.  In contrast, he saw Gesellschaft, or society, as a deliberate social contract that was witnessed in the new cities and states that were growing rapidly in the late nineteenth century.  The fear of Gesellschaft is that it is an artificially created replacement of the organically occurring Gemeinschaft.  Tonnies’ observation was not meant to describe two conflicting forms of social grouping but to point out that Gesellschaft was in fact overtaking the traditional Gemeinschaft. “But as the town lives on within the city, elements of life in the Gemeinschaft, as the only real form of life, persist within the Gesellschaft, although lingering and decaying.”[1] Tonnies’ warning points out that organic community was being supplanted by an artificial version of the traditional community.

The fear of an artificial community is fulfilled today with dystopian concerns about the phenomenon of virtual community.  Critics of the network community worry that the lack of physical and social cues in online communication lead to shallow and unmeaningful relationships.[2] More importantly, critics fear that society will lose its connection to other human beings in real life as socializing moves to a completely mediated interaction.[3] What has quelled these cries of synthetic armageddon is the realization that the sky is not falling – that community is not a zero sum game and online interactions are supplementing, not replacing, offline relationships.[4] “As the town lives on within the city,”[5] the local community still remains within the global network.

Augmented Community

As a sign of the local within the global, it is becoming increasingly common for place-based communities to incorporate online aspects into their social interaction.  For instance, the trend of social networking is becoming ever more important to religious groups as a way to encourage younger membership.[6] A number of churches have even begun supporting live twitter posts during services as a means of extending participation and communion among the congregation.[7] This phenomenon of bringing the local community into the global realm is what I define here as augmented community. Augmented community is a community that utilizes the unlimited perspective of the global in order to extend the limited vision of the local. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the phenomenon of augmented community as local community extended into a global context through an emergent tradition.

Augmented community is, in a way, a social formation of the technological augmented reality.  Augmented reality is a technologically defined method of overlaying virtual information overtop of actual perception.[8] Augmented reality overlays graphics or text over a users’ optical field of vision or over video footage in real-time.  Some common examples include: football broadcasts where the line of scrimmage is digitally added to the live shot of the action, Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) used in fighter jets and video games for targeting and navigation information, and CNN broadcasts where charts and images are displayed interactively with the live anchors.[9] In contrast to virtual reality technology, augmented reality attempts to “integrate with,” not simulate, the real world – “whereas virtual reality brashly aims to replace the real world, augmented reality respectfully supplements it.”[10] The task of augmented reality is to integrate technology as a means of “adding to” natural senses without interrupting or distracting from the real world experience.[11]

When local communities use the Internet, or other delimiting communications, as a means of engaging their local purpose they become an augmented community.  Similar to augmented reality, the augmented community overlays one aspect of itself over the other.  The use of global communication becomes a virtual layer to augment the limited local community.  As opposed to virtual community, the augmented community seeks to supplement existing local bonds, not replace them with virtual connections.  It is important to point out that the division between local and global is not simply technological.  The division of the augmented community occurs not based solely on the medium of communication but on the concern of the particular aspect of the community.  Concern is used here to describe the current interest or focus of a community.  The base of the community is always locally concerned – the local community.  This aspect of the augmented community is limited in its vision, but that limitation becomes undone when the community extends itself into the global concern – an unlimited interest in the universal or broader connections. 

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[1] Ferdinand Tonnies, “On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,” in Sociology: The Classic Statements, ed. Marcello Truzzi. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 145-154., http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/undergraduate/introsoc/gemein.html (accessed February 1, 2009).

[2] Heidi Campbell, Exploring Religious Community Online (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 16.

[3] Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia, “Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don’t Ride Alone,” Communities in Cyberspace, ed. Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (London: Routledge, 1999), 168-169.

[4] Campbell, 191.

[5] Tonnies.

[6] McClatchy-Tribune, “Some religious groups find social networking a saving grace,” Reading Eagle, July 1, 2009.

[7] Bonnie Rochman, “Twittering in Church, with the Pastor’s OK,” Time Magazine, May 3, 2009.

[8] Steven K Feiner, “Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing” Scientific American Magazine, April 2002, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=augmented-reality-a-new-w&page=6 (accessed July 5, 2009).

[9] Stephen Cawood, comment on “CNN uses Augmented Reality,” Geek Literature, comment posted 10 January 2008, http://geeklit.blogspot.com/2008/01/cnn-uses-augmented-reality.html (accessed June 7, 2009).

[10] Feiner, emphasis mine.

[11] Feiner.

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