Community Attitude.0

In “Evil Bert Laden,” Jim Brown points to the image that appeared on anti-American protest posters in 2001 of Osama Bin Laden standing next to Bert from Sesame Street as an example of a “collusion” -- a collaborative, online project in which the ‘collaboration’ happens unconsciously, often between strange bedfellows (in this case, American memesters and Islamic fundamentalists). According to Brown, “electronic collaboration is not necessarily confined to a concerted effort on the part of a well-defined community [...] [indeed,] conscious collaboration is only part of the story.” As “the Bert Laden episode points out[,] [...] community can also be something that happens to us” (par. 3). Our “globalized, networked” communities are much larger than we think, and they resist definition when the effort to define is based on assumptions about who does or does not ‘belong.’ As soon as we define the values that define ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’ -- the terrorists, the ChillOnes, whoever -- we throw up a wall of separation between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ putting on blinders that prevent us from seeing how ‘they’ are still very much an active part of our interactive sphere. Brown makes the point that, while community-building on the basis of values and other essentials is, as far as we can tell, a basic human reaction to encountering an other, it is at the end of the day just that -- a reaction. The impulse to “buil[d]” communities “around essential identities and nationalisms” can be explained as an interpretive reaction to the appearance of the other (par. 8). If we want to understand the true scope of our interconnectedness in the Internet age -- an age in which the relational nature of things is constantly being exposed by interesting new technologies in interesting new ways -- we’ll need a new way of thinking about community that takes this basic human impulse to interpret to be of fundamental importance in determining why we form communities in the first place.

If I had to sum it up, I’d say the goal of Brown’s essay is to teach us one way of navigating a world where “we don’t always get to choose our collaborators” and where “we don’t always have a say over who uses our texts” (par. 20). The hope seems to be that a new way of thinking about community could lead to a new, more hospitable way of interacting with the other... but are the majority of Web users ready to change their thinking? As Brown suggests, a lot of how we respond to the cultural differences highlighted by globalization -- whether in a way that promotes sharing and acceptance, or in one that merely promotes ‘tolerance’ -- will come down to individual encounters with ViRaL texts like Evil Bert Laden. If each of us could learn the value of adopting an accepting, hospitable attitude toward cultural otherness, then we could maybe train ourselves to control some of our hermeneutic impulses -- to avoid factoring our assumptions about the other into our interpretive efforts, or at least to recognize the effects of those assumptions on our understanding.

The question, again, is are we ready. I as an individual Web user can acknowledge that, even prior to the “rhetorical gesture” of interpellation, I am already “in-community” with the anti-American Bangladeshi publishers who made Evil Bert Laden a household image. But where do I go from there? And to what extent is the concept of being “in-community” with people I have no direct, personally meaningful connection to a useful one for me in my everyday life? These, I think, are the questions most of us will have to ask ourselves when we consider the responsibilities entailed by our “global, networked” interconnectedness as described by Brown -- responsibilities that may not be new, but that are becoming increasingly apparent thanks to Web 2.0.