My thoughts here were largely stirred by the latest episode of This American Life and specifically a report from State College, PA about the loud celebrations that followed the announcement of bin Laden’s death. The reporter lives in the same town as Penn State University and was amazed at the raucous reaction the students had to the news. Now college, students will use any occasion to throw a public party of course, but when the reporter went out to interview students she realized just why this kind of a reaction was so particular to these college students.

These students were about 8-12 years old when 9/11 occurred. Most of them probably didn’t know tragedy before that fateful day that a whole nation experienced it together. There is a good chance that most had never lost a loved one, seen a country at war, or even dreamed of being afraid for their own safety. Before they were really adults they were introduced to the “Boogie Man.” Osama bin Laden was the face of an event that drastically brought them all into adulthood – collectively at that. If you think you were confused by two planes being flown into skyscrapers then imagine being at such an impressionable age when that happens.

For the next 10 years (their entire adult lives), the country went to war. Who did we go to war with (putting WMDs aside)? We went to war with the man who was on television proudly declaring that he had killed 3,000 civilians. We did not go to war with Afghanistan, and from the simple standpoint of a 10 year old we did not go to war with a confusing network of multi-national terrorists. No, we went to war with Osama bin Laden (did the rebel alliance fight the Empire or Darth Vader? now what did the 10 year old you answer?)

So when the announcement is made that the boogie man is dead, that we have won the war against evil then you better believe there will be some celebration. Some, including me at the time, thought that this seemed inhumane and morally wrong to celebrate the murder of a human being. But I have since realized that many people did not see this event as the simple death of a person. It was a victory over an enemy. For a generation that has been without its own V-E Day or Berlin Wall moment, what else is their to celebrate but the elimination of the thing that your society fundamentally opposes.  Bin Laden was the face of underhanded death, fear, and chaos. He made himself into that image. He took on the persona as a direct attack on the Western World because it suited his purpose. And he did it with the skill of a Bond Villain. So when that persona is destroyed and the cloak of fear is lifted, the people deserve their moment to celebrate. Not the death of a person, but the victory over the Witch that had enslaved them for a decade.

“Ding Dong the Merry Oh, Sing it High,Sing it Low.

Let them know The Wicked Witch is dead.”

Siburt discussed his work in the field of utilizing visual technology to enhance the traditionally aural-based sermon. Mr. Siburt gave a fine presentation on both his past work in this area and then connected it to his current studies in Semiotic Theory. The jist of this dealt with the use of visual communication in order to present contemporary cultural references to a congregation of diversified cultural knowledge.

What struck me though was the discussion that was initiated at the end of this presentation.  Siburt talked a little about social networking and the relation that plays in his system of a visual society in communication, and when he began his discussion he opened it with a question as to what the audience felt about the future of “virtual” church. Being a small crowd representing primarily older generations the majority of the discussion fell along the lines of concern over the concept of virtual churches and the impact that would have on privacy, doctrinal unity, traditions, etc.

As the last comment, one gentleman made the comment that (and I am paraphrasing here), “I will not join Facebook because it is like letting company come in the back door instead of ringing at the front door.  And that just leaves you stuck making breakfast with one sock on.” I am serious that is really what he said. In an amazingly colorful manner he was pretty much envisioning Facebook friends to neighborhood kids that just walk in your back door and impose on you when you weren’t expecting it.

I kind of had a hard time reacting to this idea at the moment, but the first thought in my head was 1) yes that is exactly what Facebook is and 2) My God, as a church congregation isn’t that exactly what you want?

I think the thing that really set that whole discussion off on the wrong foot was the fact that the presenter asked the question about the future of “virtual” churches.  “Virtual” conjures up images people wearing those ridiculous goggles over their eyes and clumsy gloves wired to a computer. The extension of that, “virtual communities,” makes you think of creepy child stalkers and middle aged women with 34 cats. We have moved beyond our past prophecies of the virtual world to replace our own. If the success of social networking has proved anything it is that we as a society don’t want to replace our real  community by ignoring it and holing ourselves in a virtual one, we want to hold on to that real community beyond the normal calling hours. Essentially, we want to invite people in the back door.

And isn’t that a rather inviting concept for a church community. If the idea is to share your lives with a community of people in a very deep way, then why would you want to put limitations as to when they can come to the house. Why not open the back door, start making breakfast and see who wonders in from the smell. And if you’re not fully dressed when they come in, well what are some naked toes between friends.

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. 

[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.

The augmented community produces contradictory traits, which often create a somewhat paradoxical relationship between the two forms of community (local and global).  The contradictory nature of combining these oppositional ideals could very easily be divisive to the identity of the community itself.  However, what if the community itself became based on a lack of identity, or a non-conditional basis?  The augmented community becomes about standing in the doorway. The local community is staying within the confines of the inside where the surroundings are strong and dependable. The global network is going into the chaos of the outside with all of its weak ties and temporary relationships.  The augmented community is the threshold, it is neither outside nor inside but some blank combination that is both and neither.

The augmented community fits into a structure of community described by Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community. [1] Agamben likens the coming community to the image of the threshold.  He describes it as being a “whatever singularity,” or that which always matters as it is.[2] This is to say that the coming community is “mediated not by any condition of belonging, nor by the simple absence of conditions, but by belonging itself.”[3] Agamben’s vision of community is one that is without identity, because it is non-conditional.  Where characteristics are erased from this understanding of community, the actions of belonging reinstate the bonds of the community.

The augmented community must also come to terms with its “whatever singularity.”  If the community is to think of itself as a whole, then it must be a community that matters as it is.  While it may have different parts to it (the local community and the global network) it is still a singular thing.  That thing is a community, regardless of how it communes as such.  When members of a church meet inside a place of worship they are representing the same church community that meets on blogs to discuss bible verses.  Both forms of communion hold very different characteristics, but both forms also exist as institutions of the same community.  What makes this combination matter “as it is,” is not a conditional bond around characteristics; instead, the community manifests its whatever singularity through its actions of belonging – membership and tradition.

[2] Ibid, 1.

[3] Agamben, 85.

While the augmented community consists of two divergent aspects (local and global), it is the fact that it seamlessly acts as one community that really defines it.  The effective example of augmented reality is the one where the observer no longer notices a distinction between the real world and virtual aspects of the view.  While watching a televised football game, the virtual lines on the field are so seamless with the action that rarely does the viewer consciously differentiate the two.  The reason that a distinction is largely ignored is that it is the action of the game that takes precedence over the characteristics of the individual objects on the screen.  The effective augmented community is also the one where the distinctions between the local and global aspects of the community are largely invisible.  The actions of belonging form the community bonds, not individual characteristics.

The action of belonging starts with membership.  Those who are acting in the community are the ones that define it.  Relation to the community’s center, or focus, defines membership in the augmented community.  Since membership must be able to occur at both local and global levels, membership in the augmented community must take on a less bounded structure – well-formed and extrinsically defined.  By classifying the boundaries of membership on a relational center, instead of essential characteristics, membership definitions rely on the direction instead of the position of potential participants.  If individuals are moving towards the center, or purpose, of the community then they are acting within the community.  If individuals are moving away from the center, then they are acting outside of the group.  Like players on the field that are not involved in the play (thus ignored), those not in the action of belonging have lost membership in the community.

Since the center is the defining relation for membership, the action toward that center, or tradition, plays an important role in the augmented community.  Here tradition is more than just a repetition of the past, it is in fact a movement toward a collective center.  The action or focus toward the center is the tradition of the community.  Tradition, therefore takes on the role of purpose within the community.  Though the route to a purpose could be ever varied, all roads still converge on the same center.  In our televised football example, the rules of the game dictate a purpose behind the action.  The augmented reality lines on the field would be meaningless without the collective acceptance that these represent meaningful demarcations for the rules of the game (namely where the play begins [line of scrimmage] and where a first down is achieved [“first down” line]).  It is the tradition, or purpose, behind the action that makes sense of the experience.  Tradition, or purpose, makes the chaotic movement of players around imaginary lines make sense as a football play.  Tradition also makes the chaotic communications and gatherings of a group of people make sense as members in communion.

In order to investigate the characteristics and practices of an augmented community, I set out to observe the actions of a Christian religious community. The Well is a Missional Church in a suburb of Philadelphia.  The church meets regularly every Sunday morning in a remodeled warehouse within a small industrial park.  Walking into the building, it resembles a small concert venue more than it does a church.  There is a stage filled with musical instruments and equipment.  Folding chairs are set up facing the stage, and preshow music is playing over the speakers before the service begins.  The rear of the room contains a coffee bar with tables and sofas.  Artwork of all varieties covers the walls.  The contemporary look of the room is accented by the open ceiling and painted concrete walls that remind you that you are still inside a warehouse.  This is a church that meets in a very physically aware place, but clearly not the traditional sanctuary found within most Christian churches.

The Well also exists as a community online.  The church website contains announcements, podcasts of sermons, and details about what the church is and what they as a community are about.  Along with these more conventional forms of church communication are a number of links to social networking sites.  The Well has a Facebook group where members of the church talk about upcoming events and news.  The church’s twitter account feeds right onto their homepage.  Each of these form of mediated communication form a communion between the members of the community.

The Well was chosen due to its use of online communication but also due to its affiliation with Ecclesia Network, a national network of missional churches and leaders.[1] The Ecclesia Network incorporates a number of online resources including Twitter and blog posts that act as a global communication amongst the network’s local churches.  With an interest in discovering the impact of this dialogue between the local churches and their global network I began by reading and observing the online forms of communication between the churches.  During nine months of observation from October 2008 to June 2009, I read blogs and tweets between the leaders of Ecclesia churches as a form of community within the network.  In addition to personal communications and posts between leadership, posting of events and resources on the Network’s website provided insight into the ideals and purposes behind the network of churches.

During the same period I also observed the actions of the single local community within the network, The Well.  Observation consisted of reading blogs, Tweets, and Facebook activity amongst members of The Well.  Along with experiencing the online aspects of this community I visited the church on two occasions in order to interview members and experience weekly services that the community held.  Eight members of the community were interviewed before and after the services.  Three of those interviewed were leadership members of the church.  Interviews consisted of open-ended conversations.  A majority of the interviews were conducted one-on-one, but group conversation was also present during a few of the interviews.  During interviews, members were directed by the following questions:

1. How often do you talk with other members of The Well?  What means do you use to talk to them?
2. How often do you go online?  What do you do online?
3. Do you write a blog?  If so, what kind of things do you write about?
4. Do you read other people’s blogs?  What subject matters, and why do you read them?  Do you leave comments?
5. Describe your vision of The Well online.

Below the surface of the somewhat obvious online social connections are the ones that are really building the community of The Well online.  A large number of members, including leadership of the church, are avid blog writers and/or readers.  The pastors of The Well write blogs about their personal actions in leading a missional church.  A number of members of the church are seminary students who write blogs about deeply theological issues that relate back to their experiences at The Well.  Church members write personal blogs that while not strictly religious in nature are always relating back to the community in which they participate.  Beyond the larger scale of blog writing, a majority of the members that I spoke with claimed that they keep in touch with other members of the church on a daily basis – the primary way is through the Internet: email, Facebook, and Twitter.

How do both versions of The Well as an offline and online community influence each other?  If the Well is made up of both of these kinds of community then the online community must somehow reflect onto the offline community, and vise versa.  Does the local church have a new outlook that includes the global picture as well, and does the large-scale online group concern themselves with much more locally-based interests?  Is the normally homogeneous membership of the church somehow diversified by the broader definitions of online membership, and is the online community somehow centered on a more closely knit goal?  Are the traditions of the conventional church threatened by the progressive nature of online community, and is the online version of The Well less likely to devolve into the trendy nature of Internet socializing?  Can there really be a balance of these contrary traits or is there perhaps a way to accept the influence of both on the other while allowing some differences to remain?

The question to be asked as an augmented community: what is The Well?  Is it a local community that meets for church once a week to commune with each other?  Is it a global network that meets online daily through short messages and personal journal entries?  The Well is both of these communities.  It is a group of local members that share a certain passion and mission, which they communicate in both the local and the global community that they create.  However, The Well is really neither of these things.  The Well is a singularly conceptual community that describes the many instantiations of that community (the church service, the community lunch, the Facebook group, the twitter conversation between two members), but The Well is not in itself defined by those individual occurrences.  The Well is a community that holds a “whatever singularity” based on its actions of belonging – a tradition that maintains concern and membership.

Investigating the Augmented Community

This thesis looks to investigate the augmented community by examining the characteristics that it holds as a limited local community made unlimited by global augmentation.  The Well is used as an example of the augmented community by investigating the practice of the augmented community within this particular religious community.  As the definition of augmented community is elaborated, The Well provides some specific evidence of the augmented community in action.

The first chapter focuses on the augmented community as being both locally and globally concerned.  By pointing out the local and global dynamic within the augmented community, a clearer understanding of the parts that make up the community is discerned.  The relationship between The Well and Ecclesia Network provides a clear model of the locally and globally concerned aspects of an augmented community through geographic and institutional differences.  Local and global concern also takes place within the institution of The Well as a spatially and temporally limited and delimited community.  When conversations are extended from weekly to daily interactions without limitations of time and space, the augmented community becomes a more fluid iteration with less clear differences between its local and global concerns.

Chapter two investigates the definitions of membership within an augmented community.  Since the community involves both local and global concern, the boundaries of membership must also be able to survive shifts in those interests.  Membership becomes defined around a center – it is well-formed and relational.  This extrinsic definition of membership seeks to find balance when community of practice meets community of interest.  The global extension of augmented community acts as an ambassadorship into the global community.  As a representative of the augmented community, the global concern of the community is a way of providing diplomatic relations that are always focused back on the local.

The third chapter takes a look at the understanding of tradition within an augmented community.  Understanding tradition as something that must be embraced and cultivated, the augmented community uses the past as a standard of practice while still allowing for the possibility that tradition is a dynamic concept that can evolve.  When members of The Well plan the next steps for the community they first look at how their current actions match the past values while letting the standard itself emerge as a tradition of possibility.  The extension of the augmented community into the global provides a place for new input.  The evolution of the community’s tradition involves a relationship with its contextual environment.  It is this emergent understanding of tradition that brings solidarity of the augmented community as a local community in a global context – a tradition of purpose.

The tradition becomes the center for the forming and maintaining of The Well as a community.  As a missional church, the tradition of The Well is one of missional living.  A pastor at The Well best expressed missional living to me through the life story of Lesslie Newbigin.[1] Newbigin left his homeland of England for India in 1936 as a missionary for The Church of Scotland.  He rose up the ranks as a missionary bringing the gospel of Christianity to the people of India and finally retired in 1974 as Bishop of Madras.  Returning to England after almost 40 years spent bringing Christianity to India, Newbigin was met with a drastically changed culture.[2]

Secularization had since changed the social tradition of Europe from a Christian-dominated culture to a secular society.[3] Newbigin had spent a lifetime abroad discovering the relationship of Christianity within a culturally divergent culture.  He returned to find that England itself had become a seemingly conflicting culture to Christianity, through secularism.  The dominant path that Christians had allowed themselves into was one of relativism, where religion was a personal truth only.[4] Newbigin answer was what he envisioned as a mission-style approach to Christianity, only rather than taking the message abroad he sought to adapt the message within the secular society. The missional living that Newbigin inspired was one of Christianity in context – secularism meant that Christianity had to think of itself no longer as the prevalent world-view but a community in a secular culture.

The missional living philosophy that Lesslie Newbigin spread focused on a reversion to tradition.  Newbigin understood tradition as a community purpose.  To live in a certain tradition is to have trust in the purpose of that tradition.  “Merely wandering around in a clueless twilight is not seeking.  The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about “what is true for me” is an evasion of the serious business of living.”[5] Instead tradition is a continually developed understanding of purpose [6] from which the “community as a whole should advance toward a more complete understanding of and living by the truth.”[7] Newbigin agreed that acceptance of Christianity was a personal belief, but the implication of that accepted tradition had universal intent, meaning that ones personal belief did not just effect that person, or just others in the community, but the universal community as a whole.[8]

The lesson from the story of Lesslie Newbigin is that he recognized that Christianity had become a belief surrounded by other cultures, a community in context.  Newbigin contends that true missional living is being able to live in both traditions – secular and Christian.[9] Like a missionary, a member of the Christian community needs to be able to speak in both her language of tradition and the language of the social setting.  Christians had to be able to adapt the culture of secularity and pluralism in order to enhance, not deny, their own beliefs.  Missional living became, “a call for the church to be mission conscious in its own context.”[10]

The members of The Well enact their community through a consciousness of mission in their own context.  The stated mission of The Well is to “be formed around the scriptures and prayer…called to act as the hands and feet of Jesus, and proclaim the message of Jesus, in Feasterville, Bucks County, Philadelphia and the world.”[11] This is the mission, or purpose, behind The Well as a community, and their tradition is an affirmation of that purpose.  We will see in the following chapters how that tradition can be seen in their local concern and the way it reflects outward in the community’s global concern as a part of a larger society.  The tradition of The Well also plays into its definition of membership by making up the center for relational connections.  Lastly, refining the tradition itself becomes an important act of The Well as an augmented community by becoming an evolving not confining understanding of purpose.

[2] H. Dan Beeby, “Lesslie Nebigin: Biography,” http://gospel-culture.org.uk/newbio.htm (accessed July 13, 2009).

[3] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), 4.

[4] Ibid, 50.

[5] Ibid, 22.

[6] Ibid, 44.

[7] Ibid, 50.

[8] Ibid, 50.

[9] Ibid, 65.

[10] Todd Hiestand, Interview.

[11] The Well, “Mission/Vision,” The Well, http://church.thewellpa.com/all-about-us/about/.

During the 2009 National Gathering for the Ecclesia Network, a network of missional churches, pastors gathered from across the nation to discuss theological and ecclesiological issues dealing with their home churches and the network as a whole.  Like any conference, there were participants taking notes and others making jokes and comments to during the presentations.  Unlike the traditional conference, however, these personal notes and side remarks were made available to anyone that decided to listen in.  The conference members participated in a live online blog,[1] a site driven by Twitter where users post comments and are able to view comments by other participants.  The live blog from the conference reads like most Twitter blogs as a fusion of jokes, “What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness and a Unitarian?Someone who knocks [on] doors with nothing particular on his mind”; offhand remarks, “Mike [] looks like he JUST rolled out of bed- hilarious;” and thought invoking notes, “The life of Jesus is the definition of the body of Christ. Defined by three relationships: with God, the covenant community, the lost.”[2]

The comments posted on the live blog added a new level to the interaction of the conference members.  Presentations made for the physical conference allowed discussion to occur amongst the participants that were present.  In addition, the comments made on the live blog allowed those who were not physically present to join in the conversation by either watching the live blog or going back to read entries at a later time.  Additionally, the online conversation provided modes of communication not easily transmitted on the fly during a conference: hyperlinks to images, videos, other blog posts, and websites.[3] In essence, the live blog became another layer of the conference experience – an extension of the limited physical conversation into the limitless ether of the Internet.

The live blog during the Ecclesia National Gathering invokes something closely related to the augmented reality experience.  While the live blog during the Ecclesia conference was not really a form of augmented reality, it did raise a great deal of the purposes behind the augmented reality experience.  Participants did not wear special goggles, and three-dimensional pie charts did not smack them in the face, but their experience as a gathering community was in fact extended in a delimiting way.  The extension did not augment their sense of reality, but it did augment their communication as a community.  It allowed the small gathering in a local area to reach out to a global environment, where outside members could participate, photos and videos could be shared at a moments notice, and texts from outside the confines of the conference could be brought into the conversation.  The live blog became a source of augmented community.

Concern

The global and local aspects of community within the augmented community come to be recognized primarily through their respective local and global concern.  The use of “concern” is meant to represent that which the community reflects.  Concern in this context does not mean that the community is worried or apprehensive about local or global issues, rather that the community is directed towards local or global issues.  For instance, when a blogger writes about the local coffee shop, her entry is concerning that specific shop – it is not “concerned about” the shop.  The importance of this phenomenological terminology is to investigate local and global concerns as that which communities experience without focusing on the particularities.[4]

Local concern is a reflection of interests that are place-based and specifically focused.  A local concern is one that is reliant on particulars.  That which deals with specific spaces or locations is locally concerned.  That which is specifically focused on a particular topic is locally concerned.  In the same way that local anesthetic targets specific areas of the body, local concern deals with specificity – limited context.  A local concern will separate that which does and does not belong because it is the very nature of that which is local.  In contrast to the global concern, the local concern is an interest in that which is limited.

Global concern is a reflection of interests that are placeless and universal.  Global concerns here do not necessarily have to do with international dealings or worldliness.  A global concern is one that is not reliant on particulars.  That which is without spatial limitation is global because it is not reliant on a particular locality.  That which is topically general or broadly focused is global because it is not reliant on a specific topic.  The result of which leads global concern to be comprehensive and broadly dealing.  In this sense, it will make sense to consider global concern to be interest in that which is limitless.

[2] “2009 National Gathering,” ScribbleLive. http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/2009_National_Gathering?Page=1.

[3] “2009 National Gathering,” ScribbleLive. http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/2009_National_Gathering?Page=1.

[4] Joseph J. Kockelmans and Edmund Husserl, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994), 88.

The Well is a geographically located community.  The church meets regularly in a physical building for weekly services and community events.  The majority of members that attend church services at The Well live in towns and suburbs within a reasonable driving range of the church building.[1] The physical location of the church plays a major part in the formation of the community since spatial limitation places a degree of influence on who is a member of the church.  As much as any community with a physical center is necessarily located,[2] the affective limitations that locality plays on membership in The Well plays a part in the concern of the community.  Since most members of The Well come from a shared locality, their concern is often locally oriented.  Along with being listed as one of the “four foundational values”[3] of The Well, “Locality” can be seen in many areas of the community including: community maps both within the church and listed on the church website,[4] use of the building for local concerts and art exhibitions,[5] and mission work to poor areas within the county.[6]

The local concern of The Well is also witnessed through the sharing of local knowledge – a common understanding among those in a shared, specific space.[7] By reflecting on shared local knowledge, the community shares a bonding connection that brings them closer, forming what Eric Gordon and Gene Koo have labeled a placeworld.  “A placeworld is the socially manifested recognition of ‘being in the world’ that has its origin in geographic space.”[8] Communing within a placeworld can be seen in many of the blog posts by members of The Well dealing with local events: the Philadelphia Phillies’ World Series run,[9] snowstorms that hit the area,[10] and events at local coffee shops.[11] Interestingly, these examples occur not just during face-to-face conversations but also over global channels as an online community.  In this sense, the local concern of The Well stems not just from its manifestation as a physical locality but also the shared local knowledge of its members.

The local concern of The Well, therefore, is not relegated to the confines of the church as being a physical offline community.  “The global reach of the user-generated Web is the product of an accumulation of local information…the local is the building block of the global.”[12] Eric Gordon defines what he calls network locality as “the experience of interacting with located data within the perceived infinity of global access.”[13] It is an understanding of locally concerned community taking place simultaneously amongst globally concerned community.  The locally concerned community in network locality is bonded by local knowledge. When the global takes a local concern – using a Google Map to locate members of the church – it becomes network locality.  In this augmented community the gaze is turned from the limitless global to the specific local – the placeless web becomes the web of place.

What differentiates The Well as an augmented community is that its local knowledge is part of a broader tradition.  While network locality is the act of interacting through local knowledge, augmented community enacts a purposive action through local knowledge.  At The Well, the mission of being “called to act…proclaim the message of Jesus in Feasterville” is a purposeful use of local knowledge.  Locating information on a Google Map is network locality, but doing so with the purpose of forming a community to act and proclaim the message of Jesus in this location is an augmented community for tradition-based locality.

[2] Dispersed communities being a known exception.

[3] The Well, “Next Steps for The Well –2009,” The Well, http://church.thewellpa.com/news/general-updates/next-steps-for-the-well-2009/ (accessed July 7, 2009).

[4] The Well, “Community Map.”

[5] The Well, “Art Shows & Concerts at The Well,” The Well, http://arts.thewellpa.com/ (accessed July 7, 2009).

[6] The Well, “Missions Trip 2009,” The Well, http://church.thewellpa.com/missions-trip-2009/(accessed July 7, 2009).

[7] Eric Gordon, “Redefining Local Knowledge” forthcoming in Digital Cityscapes (2009).

[8] Eric Gordon “Towards a Theory of Network Locality” First Monday 13:10 (October 6, 2008), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2157/2035, 1.

[9] Gary Alloway, “That’s just philly,” There and Back Again, posted October 29, 2008, http://garyalloway.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/thats-just-philly/(accessed Feb 12, 2009).

[10] Todd Hiestand, “God Hates Philadelphia Sports Teams,” Todd Hiestand: Missional Living in Suburban America, posted October 28, 2008, http://www.toddhiestand.com/proof-god-hates-philadelphia-sports-teams/10/(accessed Nov 1, 2008).

[11]Todd Hiestand, “One Village Coffee Goodness,” Todd Hiestand: Missional Living in Suburban America, posted, October 17, 2007, http://www.toddhiestand.com/one-village-coffee-goodness/10/(accessed Fed 15, 2009).

[12] Gordon, “Towards a theory of network locality,” 8-9.

[13] Eric Gordon, “Redefining Local Knowledge”.