Literature Review: Community (and Sense of Community)
To better understand the communities in which the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (NNS) operates, we need to make sense of the scholarly literature concerning the concepts of community and sense of community. Researchers have studied many different types of communities and approached these concepts from many perspectives. For example, Fuoss (1995) noted that performance studies scholars have investigated communities as distinct and far apart as a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand, a public housing area in Chicago, an inner-city street gang, African-American fraternities and sororities, southern mill towns and Greek immigrants. Nisbet (1953) argued that the quest for community is timeless and universal and is as relevant to human existence as family and faith. He added that “the quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature – needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status and continuity” (p. 73). This quest has been an important part of how NNS has defined the purpose of its coverage of urban neighborhoods and its goal to help those neighborhoods enjoy renewed vitality and respect.
Scholars have also contended, however, that community is a misunderstood concept, one as much about group sentiment or nostalgia as anything else. Bellah (2007) wrote that “a good community is one in which there is argument, even conflict, about the meaning of the shared values and goals, and certainly about how they will be actualized in everyday life” (p. 38). Macfarlane (2009) observes that political, religious and business leaders frequently invoke community to suit their purposes, especially when they wish to position themselves as restoring it in some way – and that “community is a much-used and (perhaps) abused word,” or a “hurrah” word used as part of a “lazy rhetoric to conjure up positive imagery,” much like “other affirmative words, such as diversity,” (p. 139). Others have noted that the work of building community can be difficult and make leaders vulnerable to criticism. Harwood (2007) found that many group leaders complain they are too busy – or unwilling to offend other groups or people – to effect meaningful change in the community; they may also fear being in the spotlight.
CREATING A SENSE OF COMMUNITY
All of these theoretical perspectives bear upon the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s goal of creating a greater sense of community within the 17 Milwaukee neighborhoods it serves. NNS primarily focuses on those neighborhoods as locations determined by geographical boundaries, which is one of the key elements that a number of scholars emphasize as defining a group’s sense of community. Make no mistake, though, scholars focused on this concept are also far from consensus. Sarason (1974) defined sense of community as an “overarching value” (p. 156) and held that “you know when you have it and when you don’t” (p. 157). Taylor, Lee and Davie (2000) found that social scientists defined community either as a population grouped by a geographical location, or a government that manages social and political relationships, or a named territory or settlement with an effective communication system that allows people to share facilities and services. Lowrey, Brozana and Mackay (2008), as part of their research on community journalism, found that many studies suggest that community is “fundamentally tied to physical location,” that is, towns, cities, neighborhoods or political districts (p. 280), and that most of the articles posit community as a geographical location with political or legal boundaries. The scholars also found other geographical studies that noted the community’s role as a place to meet or connect.
NNS also hopes to bring people from different neighborhoods together to learn from one another’s successes and failures. Such is the sort of common purpose that Nisbet, Bellah and others attempt to describe. In “The Public and Its Problems,” Dewey (1927) argues that “communication can alone create a Great Community,” that the technology and industrialization of his time provided “the physical tools of communication as never before” (p. 142), and that “communal life is moral, that is, emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained” (p. 151). Dewey (1924) agrees with others that people strive for a community based on bonds, behaviors and belonging – and that “men live in a community in virtue of the things” common among them: typically shared “aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge” (pp. 5-6). Hansen and Hansen (2011) wrote that community and communication are “intrinsically linked” and that a “vibrant, healthy community” requires the latter if its members are to not only address their concerns, but also “identify with and develop ties to their community” (p. 98).
This seems to be the sort of work to which NNS aspires: enabling the communities it is covering – and the people living in them – to tell their own stories, to each other, the metropolitan area and even to anyone from the larger society that discovers its online offerings. A number of scholars have pointed to the role that media can play in such community building. Wotanis (2012) wrote that a sense of community is created and sustained by communicating face to face or through media, while Lowrey, et al. (2008) argue that media help communities to tell their own stories and remain distinctive. Friedland (2001) maintained that while place and “face-to-face conversation” still matter to creating it, community persists, “but under conditions that are radically different from those that existed as recently” as the 1960s, and thanks mostly to new technologies and global connectedness (p. 364).
FREEDOM FROM TERRITORIAL LIMITS
A key NNS component is that it distributes its work entirely on the Internet, and scholars have studied how technology shapes community connections. Riger and Lavrakas (1981) make the larger historical point that community once assumed attachment and social interaction occur in a fixed geographical space, and that modern communication and transportation have freed us from territorial limits. Macfarlane further suggested that modernity and industrialization have “irrevocably” moved society from human relationships to individualism (2009, p. 138). Not all scholars, however, credit technology or support individualism as being important when determining what makes a community. Mersey (2009) wrote that while early community research focused exclusively on geography, the Web has led many scholars to define the concept differently. Indeed, she wrote, particularly problematic for geographically based communities is the combination of demands on the media to serve audiences in print and on the Web and their overall reduced ‘‘knowledge of the community’’ (page 348). But how would this impact the connection between NNS’ readers and their sense of community? Mersey (2009a) found that the Internet does not have the same impact on community as traditional print news.
NNS considers the local experience of its neighborhoods critical as it aims to show that those living, working and serving in its targeted areas aspire to better housing, economic development, education, youth development, public safety, health, housing and so on. A number of scholars have affirmed that sense of community is often very locally grounded. Denton, for example, contended that “local news is based on the reader’s relationships with his or her communities” and that readers appreciate 10 dimensions of local news: proximity, safety, utility, government, education, spirituality, support, identity, recognition and empowerment (Denton, 1999; Pauly, Eckert, 2002). Lowrey et al., pointed to shared symbols and common goals or interests as essential to community. They also noted that modern “challenges and changes make it increasingly necessary that individuals maintain community and its meaning through shared culture” (2008, p. 281) – and agreed with Matei, Ball-Rokeach and Qiu (2001) in that communities must tell their own stories in order to be distinct social entities. In talking with neighbors in Portland, Oregon, Ritchie (2011) found they defined community in terms of access (walking distance), familiarity (familiar faces) and residential character (detached bungalows with small yards on tree-lined streets). Each homeowner appreciated that community can be tenuous, but also essential for mutual accommodation and reinforced strength and vitality, Ritchie concluded. Riger and Lavrakas (1981) defined sense of community using two primary factors: social bonding (identifying neighbors and feeling part of the neighborhood) and behavioral rootedness (years living there and how long planning to stay, and whether owning or renting a home). Riger, LeBailly and Gordon (1981) also found that while strong bondedness and residential ties helped reduce one’s fear of crime, local facilities and social interaction with neighbors did not appear to impact such fears.
In their seminal work, McMillan and Chavis (1986) wrote that these and other studies “revealed that the experience of sense of community does exist and that it does operate as a force in human life” (p. 8). They then identified four defining elements: membership (a feeling of belonging), influence (a sense of mattering or making a difference to the group), integration and fulfillment of needs (feeling that members’ needs will be met by resources gained via belonging to the group), and shared emotional connection (belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, etc.). They contended that members of a community believe their needs will be met through their commitment to be together. McMillan (1996) later helped create a major shift in defining community when he revised the four elements so that membership became spirit (faith that one belongs), influence became trust (authority based on principle), integration and need fulfillment became trade (freedom from shame) and shared emotional connection became art (fluid and growing). Nip (2006) would later summarize these sentiments by stating that a community features four primary aspects among its membership: a sense of belonging, shared forms, interactions and social ties.
These feelings of community come to be enacted in how people and organizations relate to one another. In this spirit, NNS aims to help develop a greater sense of community by reporting and presenting on its website what’s working and not working in the neighborhoods it serves. Based on interviews with people in Jackson Park, a working-class neighborhood in Milwaukee, Doolittle and MacDonald (1978) championed six communication behaviors and attitudes found within community organizations: supportive climate (for example, knowing the names of most people in the local area), family life cycle (having more children than elderly in a household), safety (a good place for children under age 12), informal interaction (visited by neighbors frequently or visiting other neighbors just the same), neighborly integration (strong identity among the people who live there) and localism (desire for activity in such organizations).
CHALLENGED BY SOCIAL, RACIAL DIFFERENCES
No discussion of community or sense of community is complete without a focus on diversity. NNS seeks to serve communities within one of the most segregated cities in America; Baird-Remba and Lubin (2013) found that blacks live in the north-central area, Hispanics stay in the southern inner city, and whites live on the edges and in the suburbs. Pauly and Eckert (2002) wrote that “the move to the suburbs has often been fueled by social, especially racial, differences” (p. 313). But this is not just a Milwaukee circumstance. While noting that sense of community is important in determining involvement in such basic neighborhood activities as attending meetings and signing petitions, Bernstein and Norwood (2008) noted that “cities and metropolitan regions around the world are challenged by a growing ethnic diversity” (p. 119).
Meanwhile, Johnson (2011) focused as well on racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity while analyzing the sense of community at an unidentified post-secondary preparatory academy in the Northeast. Her study involved more than 100 students who answered questions in focus groups or via a questionnaire. With yet another nod to shared interaction, Johnson concluded that the revised elements that McMillan (1996) prescribed for community – spirit, trust, trade and art – were evident in helping to foster a sense of community there as the students pursued their dreams. Yet she also reported, “The students themselves view this community as very diverse and have come to value this diversity as an important component in their growth” (p. 164).
All of this prior research leads to important questions about how the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service thinks about itself and does its work in the communities it serves. It is also important to consider how the news service situates itself in a city with so many communities that are both linked and distinctive? And how is the news service managing to connect people within these communities when today’s global society creates so much of an appetite for social interaction any time, anywhere?
Scholars have also contended, however, that community is a misunderstood concept, one as much about group sentiment or nostalgia as anything else. Bellah (2007) wrote that “a good community is one in which there is argument, even conflict, about the meaning of the shared values and goals, and certainly about how they will be actualized in everyday life” (p. 38). Macfarlane (2009) observes that political, religious and business leaders frequently invoke community to suit their purposes, especially when they wish to position themselves as restoring it in some way – and that “community is a much-used and (perhaps) abused word,” or a “hurrah” word used as part of a “lazy rhetoric to conjure up positive imagery,” much like “other affirmative words, such as diversity,” (p. 139). Others have noted that the work of building community can be difficult and make leaders vulnerable to criticism. Harwood (2007) found that many group leaders complain they are too busy – or unwilling to offend other groups or people – to effect meaningful change in the community; they may also fear being in the spotlight.
CREATING A SENSE OF COMMUNITY
All of these theoretical perspectives bear upon the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service’s goal of creating a greater sense of community within the 17 Milwaukee neighborhoods it serves. NNS primarily focuses on those neighborhoods as locations determined by geographical boundaries, which is one of the key elements that a number of scholars emphasize as defining a group’s sense of community. Make no mistake, though, scholars focused on this concept are also far from consensus. Sarason (1974) defined sense of community as an “overarching value” (p. 156) and held that “you know when you have it and when you don’t” (p. 157). Taylor, Lee and Davie (2000) found that social scientists defined community either as a population grouped by a geographical location, or a government that manages social and political relationships, or a named territory or settlement with an effective communication system that allows people to share facilities and services. Lowrey, Brozana and Mackay (2008), as part of their research on community journalism, found that many studies suggest that community is “fundamentally tied to physical location,” that is, towns, cities, neighborhoods or political districts (p. 280), and that most of the articles posit community as a geographical location with political or legal boundaries. The scholars also found other geographical studies that noted the community’s role as a place to meet or connect.
NNS also hopes to bring people from different neighborhoods together to learn from one another’s successes and failures. Such is the sort of common purpose that Nisbet, Bellah and others attempt to describe. In “The Public and Its Problems,” Dewey (1927) argues that “communication can alone create a Great Community,” that the technology and industrialization of his time provided “the physical tools of communication as never before” (p. 142), and that “communal life is moral, that is, emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained” (p. 151). Dewey (1924) agrees with others that people strive for a community based on bonds, behaviors and belonging – and that “men live in a community in virtue of the things” common among them: typically shared “aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge” (pp. 5-6). Hansen and Hansen (2011) wrote that community and communication are “intrinsically linked” and that a “vibrant, healthy community” requires the latter if its members are to not only address their concerns, but also “identify with and develop ties to their community” (p. 98).
This seems to be the sort of work to which NNS aspires: enabling the communities it is covering – and the people living in them – to tell their own stories, to each other, the metropolitan area and even to anyone from the larger society that discovers its online offerings. A number of scholars have pointed to the role that media can play in such community building. Wotanis (2012) wrote that a sense of community is created and sustained by communicating face to face or through media, while Lowrey, et al. (2008) argue that media help communities to tell their own stories and remain distinctive. Friedland (2001) maintained that while place and “face-to-face conversation” still matter to creating it, community persists, “but under conditions that are radically different from those that existed as recently” as the 1960s, and thanks mostly to new technologies and global connectedness (p. 364).
FREEDOM FROM TERRITORIAL LIMITS
A key NNS component is that it distributes its work entirely on the Internet, and scholars have studied how technology shapes community connections. Riger and Lavrakas (1981) make the larger historical point that community once assumed attachment and social interaction occur in a fixed geographical space, and that modern communication and transportation have freed us from territorial limits. Macfarlane further suggested that modernity and industrialization have “irrevocably” moved society from human relationships to individualism (2009, p. 138). Not all scholars, however, credit technology or support individualism as being important when determining what makes a community. Mersey (2009) wrote that while early community research focused exclusively on geography, the Web has led many scholars to define the concept differently. Indeed, she wrote, particularly problematic for geographically based communities is the combination of demands on the media to serve audiences in print and on the Web and their overall reduced ‘‘knowledge of the community’’ (page 348). But how would this impact the connection between NNS’ readers and their sense of community? Mersey (2009a) found that the Internet does not have the same impact on community as traditional print news.
NNS considers the local experience of its neighborhoods critical as it aims to show that those living, working and serving in its targeted areas aspire to better housing, economic development, education, youth development, public safety, health, housing and so on. A number of scholars have affirmed that sense of community is often very locally grounded. Denton, for example, contended that “local news is based on the reader’s relationships with his or her communities” and that readers appreciate 10 dimensions of local news: proximity, safety, utility, government, education, spirituality, support, identity, recognition and empowerment (Denton, 1999; Pauly, Eckert, 2002). Lowrey et al., pointed to shared symbols and common goals or interests as essential to community. They also noted that modern “challenges and changes make it increasingly necessary that individuals maintain community and its meaning through shared culture” (2008, p. 281) – and agreed with Matei, Ball-Rokeach and Qiu (2001) in that communities must tell their own stories in order to be distinct social entities. In talking with neighbors in Portland, Oregon, Ritchie (2011) found they defined community in terms of access (walking distance), familiarity (familiar faces) and residential character (detached bungalows with small yards on tree-lined streets). Each homeowner appreciated that community can be tenuous, but also essential for mutual accommodation and reinforced strength and vitality, Ritchie concluded. Riger and Lavrakas (1981) defined sense of community using two primary factors: social bonding (identifying neighbors and feeling part of the neighborhood) and behavioral rootedness (years living there and how long planning to stay, and whether owning or renting a home). Riger, LeBailly and Gordon (1981) also found that while strong bondedness and residential ties helped reduce one’s fear of crime, local facilities and social interaction with neighbors did not appear to impact such fears.
In their seminal work, McMillan and Chavis (1986) wrote that these and other studies “revealed that the experience of sense of community does exist and that it does operate as a force in human life” (p. 8). They then identified four defining elements: membership (a feeling of belonging), influence (a sense of mattering or making a difference to the group), integration and fulfillment of needs (feeling that members’ needs will be met by resources gained via belonging to the group), and shared emotional connection (belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together, etc.). They contended that members of a community believe their needs will be met through their commitment to be together. McMillan (1996) later helped create a major shift in defining community when he revised the four elements so that membership became spirit (faith that one belongs), influence became trust (authority based on principle), integration and need fulfillment became trade (freedom from shame) and shared emotional connection became art (fluid and growing). Nip (2006) would later summarize these sentiments by stating that a community features four primary aspects among its membership: a sense of belonging, shared forms, interactions and social ties.
These feelings of community come to be enacted in how people and organizations relate to one another. In this spirit, NNS aims to help develop a greater sense of community by reporting and presenting on its website what’s working and not working in the neighborhoods it serves. Based on interviews with people in Jackson Park, a working-class neighborhood in Milwaukee, Doolittle and MacDonald (1978) championed six communication behaviors and attitudes found within community organizations: supportive climate (for example, knowing the names of most people in the local area), family life cycle (having more children than elderly in a household), safety (a good place for children under age 12), informal interaction (visited by neighbors frequently or visiting other neighbors just the same), neighborly integration (strong identity among the people who live there) and localism (desire for activity in such organizations).
CHALLENGED BY SOCIAL, RACIAL DIFFERENCES
No discussion of community or sense of community is complete without a focus on diversity. NNS seeks to serve communities within one of the most segregated cities in America; Baird-Remba and Lubin (2013) found that blacks live in the north-central area, Hispanics stay in the southern inner city, and whites live on the edges and in the suburbs. Pauly and Eckert (2002) wrote that “the move to the suburbs has often been fueled by social, especially racial, differences” (p. 313). But this is not just a Milwaukee circumstance. While noting that sense of community is important in determining involvement in such basic neighborhood activities as attending meetings and signing petitions, Bernstein and Norwood (2008) noted that “cities and metropolitan regions around the world are challenged by a growing ethnic diversity” (p. 119).
Meanwhile, Johnson (2011) focused as well on racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity while analyzing the sense of community at an unidentified post-secondary preparatory academy in the Northeast. Her study involved more than 100 students who answered questions in focus groups or via a questionnaire. With yet another nod to shared interaction, Johnson concluded that the revised elements that McMillan (1996) prescribed for community – spirit, trust, trade and art – were evident in helping to foster a sense of community there as the students pursued their dreams. Yet she also reported, “The students themselves view this community as very diverse and have come to value this diversity as an important component in their growth” (p. 164).
All of this prior research leads to important questions about how the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service thinks about itself and does its work in the communities it serves. It is also important to consider how the news service situates itself in a city with so many communities that are both linked and distinctive? And how is the news service managing to connect people within these communities when today’s global society creates so much of an appetite for social interaction any time, anywhere?
