Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman explains how Meetup is all about “The Pursuit of Community” in the New York Times.
A Meetup is about the simple idea of using the Internet to get people off the Internet. People feel a need to commiserate or get together and talk about what’s important to them. Our biggest categories are moms, small business, health support and fitness. When we were designing the site, we were wrong about almost everything we thought people would want to use it for. I thought it would be a niche lifestyle venture, perhaps for fan clubs. I had no idea that people would form new types of P.T.A.’s, chambers of commerce or health support groups. And we weren’t thinking that anyone would want to meet about politics, but there are thousands of these Meetups. People have organized more than 200,000 monthly Meetups in more than 100 countries. There’s nothing more powerful than a community coming together around a purpose. We spend increasingly more time in front of screens. We’re more connected technologically, but we’re less connected physically.
Heiferman’s vision of technology bringing people together in pursuit of shared interests,passions and causes, from the political to the charitable to the trivial, would have delighted Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 classic Democracy in America identified voluntary association as the unique genius of the American character.
Tocqueville concluded that representative democracy had flourished in America, rather than leading to murderous despotism as it had in Tocqueville’s revolutionary France, because, among other things, Americans built a rich civic society interposed between the atomized individual and the state. Rather than suppressing political associations as factions dangerous to the health of the state, Americans embraced political associations (parties and causes), which served as “large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association.” Americans would apply that art in every other walk of life, from today’s AIDS Walks or PTA meetings to groups of rock climber enthusiasts: “The art of association then becomes… the mother of action, studied and applied by all.” Tocqueville concludes: Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.