The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a community psychology
The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a community psychology by Seymour B. Sarason
In Sarason’s overview he mentions that having close friends scattered throughout the country or world can make one feel even more acutely that a (local) sense of community is lacking. Written in 1974—before access to email, blogs, photo and video sharing, etc—I have to think that the disconnect today would be different.
Most of my friends and family are scattered throughout the world. I take this as a great opportunity to travel and visit, while keeping in touch through media between visits. We have kept in touch with email, phone calls, text messages, digital photos, blogs, mailed and posted movies, art, online web chats with audio and video … My family and friends being thousands of miles away didn’t make me feel a lack of community in the area I lived. If anything, they became a part of where I lived through our mediated connections, and I was equally aware of what was going on in their physical communities. Yet we also had private and public communities where we could interact that were not limited to the places we lived. If the connections to remote communities replaced interactions in the local community, I suppose that could be a cause for feeling that the local community was lacking. However, in many ways distributed communities can incite local involvement.
Overall Sarason’s insight into the field of community psychology was engaging, informative, and thought provoking. Especially hard-hitting for me was the conviction he expressed about community psychology needing to draw upon other fields, especially other social sciences, to gain an accurate understanding of community. This is something I believe to be equally important for media psychology. To understand what community (or media) is and how it changes, we need to understand what Sarason called background factors. Innovation will only come from a multifaceted understanding of the topics.
I’d like to read this book again, but my stack of other books I need to read just keeps growing ... so I’ll keep it on my used book watch list to add to my library for later.