“If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house. Networks connect; communities care.

Social media certainly connect us to whoever is on the other end of the line, and so extend our social networks in amazing ways. But this can come at the expense of our personal relationships.

1 Many people are so busy texting and tweeting that they barely have time for meeting and reading.

2 Where do they get the meaning? The answer may lie in lost community—in our organizations as well as our localities.

Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the “global village”, created by new information technologies. But what kind of a village is this? In the traditional village, you chatted with your neighbor at the local market, face-to-face: this was the heart of community. When that neighbor’s barn burned down, you may well have pitched in to help rebuild it. In the global village of today, the most prominent market is the soulless stock market. And when you click on that  keyboard, the message could be going to some “friend” or associate you never even met. Like those fantasy-ridden love affairs on the Internet, this kind of communicating remains untouched, and untouchable.

A century or two ago, the word community “seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part.” In contrast, the word has now become fashionable to describe what are really networks, as in the “business community”—“people with common interests [but] not common values, history, or memory. ….”

(http://www.mintzberg.org/blog/networks-communities)

Nel consigliarvi il prosieguo della lettura, auguro a tutti un buon rientro.

IL DIRIGENTE SCOLASTICO Prof.ssa Rossella Rizzatto