Community

Sociology (Humanities), 1995

Any group of two or more people, regardless of whether they display any traits which would define a community. Such as the “Latino stamp-collecting transgender pansexual facebook-boycotting community”.

The term has been most misused, obviously, by fashionable “thinkers” in Silicon Valley social media companies who like to combine Bernays’Freudian ideas with evolutionary biology into “brain hacking”. The rot started, however, with Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn’s 1995 consumer research article “Brand Community and the Sociology of Brands”.

• https://oed.com/view/Entry/37337
• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=community
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=community
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C74amJRp730
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/319618