Reflection

I may have circumvented the purpose of this project by mostly publishing links to sites that I regularly visit. FP Passport, 3QuarksDaily, and Arts & Letters Daily are great, but I've known about them for a long time. The same goes for many of the other sites that I posted.

So if the assemblage project did not open my eyes to corners of the web unknown to me, what did I gain from it? Certainly, I've created a journal of my favorite sites. And, in doing so, I created an eclectic cloud of tags that describe my reading habits and, perhaps, my priorities. My two most popular tags are blogs and news, indicative of my habit of getting almost all of my news from blogs. Other frequent tags describe my interests: photography, behavior, art, and media. But the most interesting tag, to me, is community.

The sense of community evident on the sites that I visit comes, I think, from two factors: common interest and communication. The users of most websites obviously share some sort of common interest because they are using the same website. But common interest alone does not produce a sense of community. Communication, then, is what brings users together. By sharing, debating, and criticizing--by writing--users form their own communities. Writing brings our online communities together. Reading and writing are not dying out, and human interaction has not disappeared, and communities have not devolved. The Internet has not destroyed these tenets of society, it has simply changed their forms.