Sarah and I spent the morning going over how we want to design our archive. Our goal is to focus on specific aspects of the community and using those topics as the main features on the site. This would allow for visitors who are navigating the sight to use the visuals as a tool in order to understand the main areas of the archives. When they click on a specific picture they will be taken to a new page that will hold all the information collected regarding it. I think this will allow for both a very well-functioning site that people can learn a lot from and also be very pleasing to the eye. We were also planning to have a bar that have a few sections such as about us and our contract. This will allow for a little background information on how we created the archives and why.
LEF
I am very excited to continue our research regarding this community. Their focus on sustainable living is inspiring in both how they go about doing so, and the way they speak about it. I found this video about LEF and I find it very inspirational. The founder of the community is so passionate in his quest to create an environmentally friendly community and he notes how one of the most necessary aspects to creating this is cooperation. Many people focus on the technologies required to be a fossil free community however, even more so, there needs to be cooperation between everyone involved in achieving that goal.
Reece & Thoreau
What I find so interesting about these two authors is that they both focus on the lack of natural investment not just within our economy, but our society as a whole. Reece notes in the final pages of his book that even though these communes may not have succeeded in terms of length, they succeeded in other aspects that many would deem much more important. These communities were able to create a society that was so different from what we see today in that, for example, they work for the value of it and don’t cut ties with their environment for the purpose of profit. Similar to this, Thoreau focused on people getting back in touch with their natural environment and aiming for a life without the material aspects we deem so important within today’s society.
Identifying, Targeting and Writing for an Audience
What I find so interesting about the starters of communities is how they are able to convince others to join them. Looking at it from a religious point of view I can understand how if someone is preaching about something you believe in, it may be easy to blindly follow them and accept anything else they have to say. However, when these ideas become to outlandish I find it interesting how these leaders normalize their ideas to their followers. Especially, for example with the Perfectionists, how mothers and children were not to have natural relationships in order to prevent exclusion from the rest of the members.
The Comforts of Commitment
What I found surprising about this reading was the discussion on what makes a community successful. While there are those that think the sheer length of time that the group has been established equates to their level of success, there are others that think it focuses more on the emotions of the people. Although, yes it is important to remain a community in order to grow and organize, the mindsets of the people are also a major determining factor. The discussion that “personal satisfaction and social congruence or original ideals and existence” (128) are good ways to note the success of a community.
Going off of this, the longevity of a commune was said to go hand and hand with a “dedicated and obedient community”. I suppose I never really thought about it but the idea of strict commitment in these communities was never really something I considered, more just that these people all came together with a shared goal. The author states, ” for example, as certain contemporary communes emerge as a group, though they would resist the implication that they are “building commitment,” they nevertheless begin informally to develop ways of binding a person to the group and cutting him off from his past or from life outside the commune” (134). What I find surprising are the examples that the author gives, of ways in which people show their commitment, and how so many communes view this as necessary.