Six Community Archetypes

My last post discussed the four journalistic communities and the platforms journalists use to tell audiences the communities’ stories. These nexus of platforms formed the foundation of the Journalism Breakdown and developed the techniques that I used to teach journalists how to explain those communities’ realities to the broader population. I also provided a chart of the connection between the various communities and audiences. I didn’t realize that I left out two different communities at the time of writing the book or publishing the post.

These two other communities came from my dissertation that I wrote almost a decade ago. This realization came after finding an old PowerPoint presentation I was going to use to defend my dissertation. I didn’t need it because the committee was pleased with my work. They suggested minor revisions before signing off on the paperwork.

I was attempting to explain how people on Facebook organized themselves via the various pages and groups on the site. The dissertation never mentioned a community of place or a community of convenience, as I wasn’t thinking about people on Facebook from a journalistic perspective. Instead, I was developing a more social-psychological model to explain my methods’ results. 

I originally had five communities in my notes that I wanted to discuss. Locus (now local) communities didn’t make the paper’s final version as I didn’t have enough information about them from my research to include them. The four communities remaining were: practice, interest, purpose, and circumstance. Those four fit most of the groups and pages I was discussing in my dissertation. Adding communities of purpose and communities of circumstance to this discussion gives a total of six communities to work from for future research. They are:

• Communities of locus (communities defined solely by a common connection to a location with the shared social experiences related to that place),
• Communities of convenience (communities that are temporarily based on external factors that momentarily connect people together),
• Communities of practice (communities who share a common set the ethical standards, training, and best practices to maintain the status quo and advancement of occupation or vocation),
• Communities of interest (communities that share passions, knowledge, and mutual respect of the criteria that define a hobby or pastime)
• Communities of purpose (communities of people who are going through the same process or are trying to achieve a similar objective), and
• Communities of circumstance (communities that are driven by life position, occasion, or life experiences rather than a profession)

These six communities (the four journalistic and two social-psychological) are useful for developing a psychographic analysis of community members. From a public speaking or rhetorical position, these communities allow me to get to the heart of their collective motivations, needs, wants, and desires to understand better how to address the audience. It is possible with some additional time to develop a journalistic definition for an audience of purpose and audience of circumstance that would fit the broader Journalism Breakdown model. As of right now, there is little reason to do so.

It is also a fair point to note that one community could have a broad overlap with another community based on social and cultural forces. The example that always comes to mind is Dresden, Ohio, in the 1990s. People living in the same town (community of locus) could all be passionate about the same hobby of basket weaving and collecting (community of interest). This definition of their community would flip depending on what type of events was happening in the area (high school football game vs. basket festival). Those factors influence people’s perception of who was in their community at any given moment.

One of the primary reasons I’m coming back to this theory of community development is that it helps me square the circle when connecting two of my research interests. My understanding of journalism has been informally informed by my grad school classes in sociology and social psychology. I consider people like Erving Goffman, Neil Postman, and James W. Carey as the people that shaped my view of the world. It seems that Goffman’s Framing Analysis and Dramaturgy theory influenced several of my recent publications. I still enjoy reading Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Finally, Carey’s work with John J. Quirk on The History of the Future is a foundational work for the Communication and the Future interest division, one of the National Communication Association divisions that I consider my home.

It seems by developing this model out a little more that I can address one of Carey’s chief criticism with the teaching the history and mandates of journalism. To quote Carey from his A Short History of Journalism:

I place this emphasis on the reflexive creation of journalism, the public sphere, and the nation-state to sustain a simple but basic point: The origins of journalism are the same as the origins of republican or democratic forms of governance—no journalism, no democracy. But it is equally true that without democracy, there can be no journalism. When democracy falters, journalism falters, and when journalism goes awry, democracy goes awry. The fate of journalism, the nation-state, and the public sphere are intimately intertwined and cannot be easily separated. In the modern world, in an age of independent journalism, this is a controversial assumption, for it seems to commit journalists to the defense of something, to compromise their valued nonpartisanship. It claims that journalists can be independent or objective about everything but democracy, for to do so is to abandon the craft. About democratic institutions, about the way of life of democracy, journalists are not permitted to be indifferent, nonpartisan, or objective.

Carey’s A Short History of Journalism (2007) p.13

Carey seems to be getting to the heart of journalism by stating that journalists should be engaged with the community to protect the tenets of a democracy. Journalists must tackle with intensity those that seek to damage the community’s ability to govern itself democratically.