Seems like you're mixing this with tech hubs and online communities. Or my understanding of what a real community is, is different than yours.
If you want to play "more community than thou", you're going to lose to the cohousing I spent my 20s in.
Yeah, a lot of things ca be a community. Even my board games or bouldering communities. But that has nothing to do with the type of city community in this topic.
>Your definition of community is too narrow.
It's not my definition here. In this topic we're talking specifically about digital nomads and whether they'd benefit the city of Venice.
>If you want to play "more community than thou", you're going to lose to the cohousing I spent my 20s in
I'm not playing anything against any community, but the topic was whether groups of digital nomads can form a community that would benefit the existing communities of the city of Venice and I gave my opinion on why that would not be the case, so please, let's stop changing goalposts to contrarian anecdotes (your community in your dorm from your 20's is not the same as the community of the city of Venice).
You are certainly in a community but you are probably not much of a part of the community you're visiting. And if my experience as someone who grew up in a tourist destination is any guide, the locals whose job it is to be nice to you probably swap stories about your cluelessness about the local culture, and a lot of the locals whose job is not being nice to you view you with vague disdain at best.
You are raw material for the local economy and, we will generally do our best to politely pick you up by your ankles, shake you until money stops falling out, and send you on your way, while making sure you have a good enough time doing this to come back again once you have more money.
I've known digital nomads though. One of them bought a house with the woman he met in that country and remains to this day. Maybe you should reflect on why you think so little of local people in the countries digital nomads visit that you can't imagine them connecting with or being genuinely interested in travelers.
That is an immigrant, not a digital nomad. Else by your definition, I'm a digital nomad in Europe for the past 7 years - which sounds ridiculous, considering I'm eligible for citizenship in 4 European countries by virtue of my stay.
Then you probably never actually experienced a real community.
I’ve grown up in a small town of about ~3000 inhabitants, who all pretty much knew each other. Random people knew my family, I could walk anywhere and meet someone who went to school with my dad or who had worked with my grandfather in the 60s/70s. I was often taken care of, as a small child, by people who I didn’t know directly but that knew my family, and who my parents knew. There was also gossip of course, and some darker patterns (early 90ies), but the core idea was thar everybody knew each other and had formed long lasting bonds over the decades.
This is what community means when we’re talking towns, not Internet forums.
And by the way: most natives will stick around when things are not so great too, nomads will just go somewhere else… in this sense digital normads are more like leeches than anything. They will make prices rise and only improve the pockets of few people (landlords, mainly).
x100 this!
When you end up in a rough spot a physical community can band together to help you, if your place burns down people on the internet will send you lots of thoughts and prayers and some very generous people might shell out a few bucks to help. In a physical community there a limits on what you'll do or say to a person because you have to see them, you share the same social space, and they can materially effect your life. In internet communities everyone outside of your group isn't part of your community and can't impact your life at all so there is no reason to hold back on your worst impulses.
I think the widespread societal decay we are seeing probably relates to the dissolution of real communities as they've been replaced by the internet, huge geographical mobility and a decline in family, ethnic/national, and religious identity at the same time.
People talk about communities when really they’re talking about users. Ideally paying users, more often users that someone has to keep engaged so that some other entity will give revenue (eg: youtube channels followers “communities”).
Take hacker news for example: we generally have zero saying in what the rules are, what is moderated fairly and what isn’t, what’s okay to post and what isn’t. We’re all strangers to each other and there isn’t an ounce of attachments between a random couple of users, again because we’re all strangers to each other. On average, we share very little with each other, except the fact that we all need oxygen to breathe and are somehow interested in technology.
That’s not how communities work. In true communities people can speak up, things can change, it’s rare to impossible for people to be banned.
And don’t get me wrong I’m only taking hacker news as an example but the same reasoning apply to most online “communities”.
Regarding the swap of real “communities”, I don’t think it’s entirely bad. I did it myself, because it’s effectively the only way to reach like minded people if you have interests outside what’s trending in your physical community.
> I think the widespread societal decay we are seeing probably relates to the dissolution of real communities as they've been replaced by the internet, huge geographical mobility and a decline in family, ethnic/national, and religious identity at the same time.
On this point i mostly disagree. Geographical mobility is good (where you were born is not a death sentence anymore), decline in family is okay (the old purely- and strictly-eterosexual family in a strictly religious form is essentially deprecated) ethnic/national identity is essentially bs and a source for unnecessary conflict (we’re all humans, it’s high time we start acting like that) and religion identity is the ultimate bs (there is no god).
I'm glad you got to experience this idyllic small-town community. That wasn't an option for me. My town was the poorest in my state, so I went to the best possible college elsewhere, and have since lived in other places for work. Incredibly, moving out of my shitty hometown has not prevented me from experiencing community. In fact I'd say I experienced more community in my few years living and working abroad than I ever have in America, where I now live. Frankly I'm finding it very hard to find community in a country full of people who have never left their hometowns and have no concept of people or ways of life that differ from their own. At least I still have group chats with the real friends I made from going to new places and doing new things.
Same for me, i grew up in rural south Italy.
> At least I still have group chats with the real friends I made from going to new places and doing new things.
That’s a nice thing you got there, I’m glad for you.
But we’re talking town level community here and not, again, internet forums and online chat rooms (slack/discord/whatever).
At a town level, communities form over decades and over shared struggles (mostly).
This is nonsense, community is simply about about shared experience and can absolutely happen with strangers or short term acquaintances. In fact I'd say that's the primary way I've experienced community from college onwards (now 30 y/o) and I expect many young people would feel the same.
More to the point, digital nomads often stay in a place for months on end. That's more than enough time to run into people in similar circumstances at a bar/cafe a few times and befriend them, creating shared in-jokes and opinions of your situation, passing them on to other people you meet such that they take on a life of their own—aka, culture. You need look no farther than major digital nomad hubs like Chiang Mai and Bali to see that there are extremely vibrant communities in these places, which is why so many nomads find their ways there.