The Benefits of Online Community
Community is an ever-precious commodity for everyone, everywhere. In community, people find support and conversation and a mutual understanding. Only by working together can we hope to achieve truly great things, and the community is the first step in that. For most of human history, community had been organized around physical spaces, but now truly communal spaces are slowly disappearing. Add in the difficulties that disabled people have getting to physical spaces in general due to the inaccessibility of transit, and disabled people are more bereft of these traditional communities.
There is another way, though, and that is through the creation of online communities.
Some of the first uses of the internet for general use (rather than for the military or research institutions) were Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). These were essentially very early forums, and allowed people who knew how to find them to communicate together, gathering information and just chatting. The first public dial-up BBS was put into effect in 1978 as a way for friends to communicate when the Great Chicago Blizzard prevented transit.
Since then, networks of connections have expanded and the specific ways that people communicate online have evolved. From forums to chat messengers to social media to video game streaming, the internet has created digital spaces for communities to be brought to life. Much of my youth was spent playing games online with people who were once strangers, spread across the world, but after years of playing together, we had become friends.
Not all of these communities have been the healthiest, but the same could be said for all communities. There is always some degree of risk associated with opening oneself up to be vulnerable to a group of people, but it’s a necessary risk to keep from becoming entirely isolated in a world that so often seeks to separate us.
Online spaces benefit from being very accessible. Computer technology has reached the point where almost everyone can use the internet, so long as they have the right accessibility tools available. The ability to access the internet from home is great for people with mobility disabilities and those that cannot otherwise get to places. The emphasis on words alone, rather than words and non-verbal communication (except in easily parsable emojis) also makes text communication much easier for many neurodivergent people. The ability of multiple people to write at once and have a legible conversation helps a lot with me, as otherwise my social anxiety makes it difficult to know when it’s okay for me to talk.
Gaming has become a major focus for communities online. Thinking about most kinds of media (broadly speaking) is something that can be done alone and then shared. The kinds of tools that help to analyze one work in a medium apply to all works, that is, knowing how to look at the themes of one book allows a person to look at themes in all books. Playing video games, however, does require new strategies for each game, which mostly take the forms of guides and guidance from peers, rather than publisher-printed strategy guides. Video games thrive when in conversation, with players helping each other to overcome challenges and learn about secrets in order to master the games, and these conversations are happening online.
Many games are also best played with a group, and so having spaces to organize playing together makes sense. As those spaces become places for discussion around the game, it’s inevitable for the conversations to broaden and become the seed of a proper community.
Discord is a chat program that allows individuals to host servers that others can join. The servers can be aligned around any theme, though usually they have a hobby or a personality at their core. For example, popular streamers typically have their own Discord servers and most individual games also have their own Discords. Particularly large multiplayer games will have multiple Discords, organized around people who play it together.
Discord is one of the most popular apps for community creation. This is partially because invites can be shared freely, and partially because a given server is broken up into different channels. Channels then are about specific subjects, allowing for a more organized flow of conversation. Typically, the primary subject of the server has multiple channels devoted to it, but there are also channels for general discussion, link sharing, and other off-topic conversations.
While the main purpose of a given Discord remains important, it’s these side channels that really elevate Discord’s ability to create a community. A space to unwind and just enjoy spending time with others online is necessary to create a space that is more than purely functional. In these side channels, participants can get to know one another as people, to offer emotional support in difficult times, to provide distractions from day-to-day stresses, and to commiserate in shared difficulties.
In this way, the sort of digital spaces offered by Discord are especially ideal for disabled people, as it removes the barriers that are often present in physical spaces and provides a space where disabled people can freely discuss their disability with others who might be across the globe, but sharing in a similar struggle against ableism.
By Mids Meinberg
