On and off for the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about two big German words that I used to know for a short time in university, forgot, then recently rediscovered: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Longer definitions than this are advised if you want to be able to use the terms in cocktail conversation, but here’s what they mean to me right now and why they’ve been on my mind.

Both words try to describe the way humans work in a social setting. Both are unreal in that they describe an idealized situation that has never and (likely) will never exist. But they’re useful for understanding many common traits, approaches and responses to online communities.

In short, the differences:

Gemeinschaft

• individuals oriented to their group interests more than their self interests
• common mores of accepted behaviour among the group
• based on shared beliefs and values
• strength of the group derived from the strength of agreement of beliefs and values
• controlled mostly by internal agreement with minimal enforcement

Gesellschaft

• individual self interest trumps shared interest
• no common mores of accepted behaviour
• groups that serve individual self interest thrive
• groups can be fragmented and aligned against each other
• controlled mostly by external pressures and necessary enforcement

In the differences we can find many of the common discussion points we see today in online communities. What’s good for the community? How to create and enforce rules? How to reward behaviour? What behaviour to reward?

I like thinking about this tall-forehead stuff because it lets me see the roots of the different approaches to communities – more communal, group-oriented, internally enforced policies or more individual-oriented, top-down policies – and their sociological lineage. Many folks are taking about the unbundling of the corporation, the migration on value outside the company, and Gesellschaft is the German word for company.

I don’t really have a point to all of this, other than to see a continuity to the discussions we’re having. We’re not tackling new problems, we’re just seeing new ways of expressing the existing conflicts of humans in groups.

And I guess that is my point. This whole Web 2.0 handle is describing a time when the technology has gotten easy enough that it’s not longer the thing we’re talking about. Now we’re on to the human problems, the human concerns.