A Few Thoughts On ‘Community’

A long time ago, an American friend of mine pointed me to some research which concluded that human beings coexist best in communities of up to 250 people. I didn’t give it too much creedence at the time, but I’ve thought about it many times since as online ‘communities’ include thousands, if not millions of individuals.

The reality is that as human beings we need to learn to interact with others on a number of different levels, and it starts with family, which then becomes the life focus for most of us. As I write this, there are 81 living Reeds whose lives came about in whole or in part because of my Mum and Dad. I’m one of 9 children, a father of 2, a grandfather to 4, and uncle to 28, and a great or twice great uncle to the rest. We keep in touch, but it isn’t an easy thing to do regularly as we all go about our respective lives. Our family alone constitutes a little over 30% of that magic number of 250, so hopefully you can see where I’m going with this current stream of consciousness. You can’t truly ‘know’ many more than that number.

At school, our class sizes were generally around 30 until we moved up to the two ‘sixth form’ years. Throughout school, we knew everyone in our class, and probably remember most of their names and faces today, whether we liked them or we didn’t, and we learned which ones to keep as long term friends. The schools themselves had pupil numbers anywhere between a few hundred and a couple of thousand. Our continuing time with family and our comparatively few years at school played a huge part in shaping who we are, but our communities remained small.

In my working life, the maximum number of direct colleagues would have been about 40, in a nationwide company that employed about 250 people. I was one export manager in a company focused on domestic business. As such, my work ‘community’ became the people I worked with around the world: agents and distributors who numbered around 40. I knew them all well because that was my business. Most continued with me after I set up my own consultancy in 2003/4, and I’m still just a phone call away from at least half of them long after retirement.

We love our football, and during our 35 years in Sale our nearest football team happened to be Manchester United. Moira had supported them since she was a toddler, so it was natural we went to Old Trafford every other week to support our local team, just four tram stops away. We stopped going after the American Glazer family took over the reins of the club and plunged it into billions of pounds of debt – me and Duncan then joining the community-based alternative, FC United of Manchester, following them at home and away for the best part of ten years. Our crowd of 75,000 home supporters suddenly dropped to 2,000 regular supporters, less than half of whom went on the away trips. The community spirit was closer and stronger, and the people we knew well at the club probably numbered less than 50.

When social media came along, it gave us all the opportunity to feel part of something much bigger, but it became so big so quickly that few of us could cope with it. Pathetically, adults began scrambling for high follower numbers or ‘friends’: quantity over quality, as if the numbers meant something. You simply can’t be in regular, meaningful contact with 5,000+ people because humans don’t work like that. Most would struggle with 500 – I know I would! Social media has its place, but it should be in the background of life, not driving it. We now have a situation where the very meaning of community has become confused, where acquaintances are apparently friends, and where trust levels need to be managed extremely carefully to prevent our lives from being infiltrated by bad actors. A reset is badly needed.

A true spirit of community has only ever involved, and will only ever involve, a core number of people. That doesn’t mean community is necessarily insular, just that on a regular, day to day basis, small numbers are mainly how life works. It’s also how we should be teaching our children to build their relationships: most people interact on an occasional basis, but the most important people in our lives are those we hold closest.

Peace.

John