A Sense of Community

The community I live in, Brambleton, is a master planned community that was one of the first in the nation to have fiber to the home (FTTH). Part of having FTTH, is that we have a community intranet where residents can access the latest newsletter, a community directory, post classified ads, and partake in the community forum.

While one might imagine that an online community forum might facilitate community discourse, that hasn’t really been the case. Our forum seems to foment the typical petty annoyances (such as mowing the lawn too early in the morning) of suburbia into full-scale diatribes on social ethics.

This summer Brambleton residents have been treated to four threads on repeated closures of the pool for health reasons. It seems that there is a phantom aquatic pooper running amok in Brambleton and this has lead to the closure of the pool 12 times and the banning of toddlers from the pool over the July 4 holiday. Further, these incidents and the resulting forum threads have pitted childless residents against the parents of young children.

Of course, this is just a reflection of a demographic shift going on throughout the country. The number of households without children under 18 is increasing. I moved from Arlington County, which is a county that is increasingly made up of childless households. I did not, however, expect to find this issue in Loudoun County—the third fastest growing county in the nation. A county in which a third of the population is under age 18 and another third is in the age group most likely to be parents.

Our forum in Brambleton differs from many online bulletin boards in that you post under your own name. In addition, users can email you by simply clicking a link, get a map to your house with one click, or can look up your address and phone number (if you listed them in the directory). So I must say that I am dumbfounded by some of the posts made by residents. There is the usual yuppie braggadocio about cars, decks, patios and—for a community located in the Dulles tech corridor—boasts about home network and home theater setups.

However there have been several posts by one particular resident that I offend me with their subtle racism, cultural bigotry, and jingoism. This one individual has managed to turn a request for a cab company recommendation into a commentary on cab drivers’ inability to speak English. The person further expounded on the language barrier in one of the pool threads by positing the theory that the culprit might not know the pool rules because they cannot speak and read the language. The individual adds further insult to their theory by implying that individuals not originally from the United States do not have the same concept of hygiene as Americans.

Now you might think that I am unhappy in Brambleton and that I am painting my community in an unflattering light or that I do not like my fellow residents. Let me state that I really like Brambleton. It is still in its early phases of development but has already established a wonderful sense of community. Also, I have wonderful neighbors, who do not pick apart the same petty sins that my online compatriots do. The one difference, I speak with these neighbors the old fashioned way: face-to-face.

Postscript: Imagine my surprise (or should I say dismay) to find a post from the neighborhood xenophobe, who has volunteered to apply to be a Today show suburban correspondent. This individual felt qualified to be a correspondent because of the copious amount of neighborhood gossip they could divulge. So let’s see a yenta with a limited world view—just who I would want to represent my community.