I’m studying a phenomenon I call extreme community, which I expect to become a widespread and necessary practice in the coming years and decades.
It doesn’t sound inviting, does it, this “extreme” business. It sounds disturbing, and that’s just the point: we should be more disturbed than we are.
Extreme community is about acting smartly on that urgency. It combines the homebound concerns of residency with the fast and far-reaching communications capabilities of the Internet.
It’s extreme because it asks us to drop or transform many conventions that have encrusted society over the past century, and move civic action into a more effective and economical mode to match the times and the changes we are facing.
Why is it 3.0? Towns and residential villages built for group survival were 1.0. Special interest groups finding themselves and communicating through electronic media were 2.0. Combining those two “reasons to be” with the big shifts in global economy, climate change and technology makes 3.0.
We’re far from realizing a world of extreme communities in the 3.0 configuration. Large businesses and government-related groups have been the among slowest to adopt and effectively implement social media. And the truly extreme communities – the slums that surround major cities in the developing world – are more 1.0 than 2.0, though the use of cell phones is pushing them rapidly into role model status for the 3.0 generation.
This blog is exploratory and will contain a lot of resources.