Online is the new local
Illustration by Dide Tengiz
by Laura Wheatman Hill
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How apps and digital groups are creating community
In the olden days (the ‘90s and earlier), if you wanted to know what your neighbors thought, you had to go knock on their doors or attend a neighborhood association meeting. If you wanted to buy something used, you had to scour garage sales and newspaper ads or hope you had a neighbor with a child older than yours who could pass you some hand-me-downs.
While these methods of building community still exist, many of them have gone online. These days, you can find out about yard sales and local happenings from your neighborhood social media page, Nextdoor, or city-specific Reddit threads. Localized hashtags on social media can also help you to zero in on updates related to your immediate surroundings. You can shop for free or used items in local groups and lay claim to those items via a comment or personal message. To voice your opinion on any given issue, you need only make a post on one of the countless social sites and let the comments and reactions come flooding in. Online communities have augmented physical proximity when it comes to meeting people and interacting with like-minded nearby folks.
Dide Tengiz
NIMBYism and the rise of the neighborhood online community
The risk of going online to help strengthen your ties to your real-world community is that, with more opinions readily available, there are more opportunities for bias, exclusion, and hate. ‘Not in my backyard’ (NIMBY) sentiments are easier to drum up behind a screen. If you don’t know people in person — if you never see them walking their kids to school, shopping at local businesses, or keeping up their gardens, for instance — you are more likely to form judgments based on their words, name, or picture in an online post. And while what we each provide online about ourselves amounts to pieces of potentially useful information, the value of that information does not exceed the sum of its parts: online portrayals and interactions aren’t perfect or whole reflections of individuals, let alone their character.
I once posted on my local Nextdoor asking for a plumber recommendation after a houseguest had flushed some (definitely) non-flushable wipes. Instead of giving me the name of their favorite Mario brother, I was hit with a wave of comments about my post. Someone told me I shouldn’t shame the person who had clogged up my toilet (a person who did not have access to this post and who I didn’t name, just alluded to as the reason for needing a plumber). Others replied to the negative comments, berating these people for chastising me when all I’d asked for was the name of a company. Suffice to say, I wound up doing my own independent research to find a plumber. Local “mom Facebook groups” have a similar bad rap when it comes to policing tone or getting off topic.
Building community on a wider scale
Despite their not-always-great reputation, it was my local mom Facebook group that saved me from the isolation of new motherhood.
When someone posted a meetup for babies born in the spring of 2014, I’d been desperate for human interaction. I was the first of my friends to have a baby and my husband had gone back to work right away due to no parental leave. I’d taken to strapping my newborn into a carrier and walking the streets of my neighborhood, looking for signs of other parents. We met up at a coffee shop and I connected with a group of women and their children who are still some of mine and my daughter’s best friends.
This phenomenon of using online communities to foster IRL relationships isn’t only for lonely new moms, though.
“Social media has been viewed as a method for keeping people connected with one another, no matter where they are in the world. But now, social media users are craving more in-person interactions with people nearby; they want to create connections online and then foster meaningful relationships in the real world,” says Veronica Lin, head of user experiences and communications at Playsee, a map-based social media platform meant to be used to foster community through individual posts and recommendations. Apps like Meetup, the “friendship” settings on many dating apps, and Facebook all create opportunities for in-person interactions beyond the cyberverse.
Dide Tengiz
Everyone’s doing it
While meeting someone you met online used to be considered dangerous and unwise, the majority of people have interacted with someone offline that they “met” online. Pew research from 2020 said that 71% of online dating app users feel meeting someone from an app is safe.
It’s not just for romantic interactions, either. Lin says, “Based on a recent survey from Playsee, 92% of respondents trust recommendations for activities, experiences, and restaurants from other users on social media and 60% of social media users have arranged an in-person meet up with someone they initially met on social media that wasn’t a dating app.” While it’s always important to be careful when meeting up with someone you only previously knew online, being able to search people via mutuals or other identifying information can make it safer than it used to be to meet someone online. In fact, being able to look someone up before meeting — due to the variety of social media and other information available, such as their LinkedIn profile — can help you to vet people a bit in advance.
It isn’t perfect, but it’s ours
All of the advantages of our digitally connected world come with some serious pitfalls. In some ways, neighborhoods before the internet were more intimate and interdependent than what we have today. But in many other ways, the kind of interactions we can now have with neighbors streamline our ability to strengthen our relationships with the community members who already surround us. The important part? Make sure you actually do get to know them offline if possible and remember not only that it takes a village, but that a village needs lots of types of people.