Modernist Communitarianism or Digital Blah Blah?

The condition of modernity is to find our identity in the
choice of the communities we elect to belong to
Hannah Arendt

from openDemocracy

There is no privileged basis for choice or identity, you just elect. But it is also deeply communitarian: it is elections of membership that bestow identity. The world of abundance has given us opportunities like never before to elect membership to communities: the openDemocrats, the Philosophers' House, SlashDot, the KiteForum, this network and that network. I am the web sites I make accounts at. I sign-up, therefore I am.

The world behind the click
The greater the abundance, the less significance in a choice. And where choices are no longer meaningful, an often unbearable pressure is placed on the psychology of election: I invest my choices with all the significance my tired self can muster because there is no other source of meaning here. This poor self, which thinks it has defined itself in every assault on it of the brand economy, finds a new world of self-definition in the digital commons: but can the commons make those choices substantial? When I make an account at this website or other, I have endowed it with a part of my soul. Will it pay me back? And can it pay in the currency that I want - a currency of belonging?

[...] So here is the paradox for communities of the digital commons: to build a community is to offer an escape from the arbitrary; but to release material to the digital commons is to add to the conditions of the arbitrary.