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Maryl Neff, Traffic Manager:

If you've hung out at the Tripod Web site much, you know that one of the buzzwords here is "community." I was sitting in a Tripod meeting in December when this subject came up. One of the editors made a comment about online communities that implied that the only kind of community heretofore was the traditional community, as in a geographic location — a town or neighborhood — and that the Web made way for a whole new concept.

What a lot of people don't realize is that the study of community has been going on for more than 100 years. While the geographic community may have been the original orientation, people began forming other types of communities back in the early part of the century. As both travel and communications methods have improved, people have been able to communicate and meet with others who have the same professions, interests or lifestyles — allowing communities of interest to continue to develop and grow.

Most of us have belonged to a number of communities throughout our lives. I grew up in a little cowtown called Clovis, New Mexico, on the Texas border about a hundred miles from Lubbock (but not too close to Lubbock — "nobody wants to be too close to Lubbock," as Nanci Griffith once said). This was my geographic community, and to some extent it still is. I have family and friends there, and my parents still keep me informed on the major goings-on (whether I want to know or not). The picture you see here is of me with my hometown friend, Diane, whom I've known practically since birth.

Since leaving Clovis to attend college, I've lived in many different places including Texas, Idaho, Georgia, Germany, Colorado, Florida, and Tennessee. In only one of those places could I say that I belonged to a geographic community per se. Other than that, the communities to which I have belonged and do belong all focus on special interests or common situations.

For instance, in graduate school I belonged to a community of communications grad students. And we all belonged to the university community by virtue of our student status. The professors belonged to one or more academic communities — the community of profs in their department or college, the community which included other profs from other schools around the country who are in the same discipline, etc.

I also belong to some online communities. A few years back I discovered e-mail and then started exploring the Internet. As a fan of contemporary folk and acoustic music, my first stop was the rec.music.folk newsgroup. Not much of a community there, but this did lead me to the folk_music mailing list. Here I found an actual community of people who are involved in folk and acoustic music. I'll come back to this in a minute.

One direction I took from the folk_music list was to join the Nanci Griffith mailing list around 1992 — I'm one of the original NanciNetters. I have a great love of the music and respect for Ms. Griffith, and I wanted to learn more about her. For several years I read the list avidly, contributing when I could, learning more about Nanci, her background and songwriters she's covered, and gathering more of her music. While I'm not active on the list these days, I do know that many of the regulars on the list (and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them!) have formed a community. They get together at Nanci's concerts, the Kerrville Folk Festival, and other musical (and now non-musical) events. At least one married couple met through the list, strong friendships have formed, and an old friend of mine reconnected with me after seeing one of my postings to the list. This list is just one example of an online community that was formed around a common interest, music. This community won't fade any time soon.

As for where the folk_music list community has led me, I've become a member of a larger musical community. I'm an avid supporter of artists on the folk music circuit. I've joined the Folk Alliance, which supports all kinds of folk music and dance in North America. I've become friends with numerous people in the music business. I changed my dissertation topic to focus on the folk music community. I worked for a couple of folk artists in Nashville, and I continue to write a newsletter for the National Online Music Alliance, which hosts Web pages for more than 200 independent artists. My membership in the folk music community (or various musical communities) probably is my most important community membership, and it all started one day when I subscribed to a mailing list online.

I guess that all of this is to say that the online community is not the first "other" kind of community outside of the geographic kind, but it can be quite powerful. Back when I started reading the online mailing lists, I wouldn't have guessed that online music communities would become such an important part of my life and change its direction completely.

Maryl, Traffic Manager (3/20/98)

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