"Community" is a word that carries much baggage but little specificity. Referencing a summary of the literature on this, Chandran Kukathas discussed three traditional models. The first is Tönnies's, which rests on "geographical locality" and "some common origin" such as "ties of blood and kinship, as well as shared habitats, attitudes, and experiences" all of which are "organic" as opposed to contractual or otherwise voluntarily chosen. The second is exemplified by Rober MacIver who envisioned community as fundamentally being about shared interests. "A community, for MacIver, can be the product of the will of its members; but it also had to be a will for the good or interests the members had in common. Like Tönnies, he sees a shared locality as a necessary condition of community, but his model differs from the first insofar as historical ties or associations are not essential" The last model, which Kukathas does not attribute to any one thinker, removes even the need for shared locality or a strong commitment to the good of the group, bringing "trade unions and professional organizations" and even groups with "relatively weak bonds of commitment" to fall under this definition. Kukathas himself considers community any "collectivity of individuals who share an understanding of what is public and what is private within that collectivity."

I am not going to insist on any of these definitions. Indeed, it seems to me that the stakes of defining the word "community" do not rise above the level of clarifying the specific concepts that a specific person, such as Kukathas, will be discussing. When García Martínez says that online communities are not real communities, he is not suggesting that Tufekci needs to consult a dictionary. He is suggesting that they do not matter, that they fall short of some moral standard by being too frivolous, too loosely bound together, too lacking in depth or wisdom or merit. Take your pick.

But the range of ways of being together are vast and that the ways in which they can be meaningful and important in people's lives equally so. Too many people imbibe deeply from Romantic currents and end up blind to the many possibilities that exist. Let us try to correct this tendency without becoming blind ourselves to the legitimate sources of the Romantic's concerns.

At a high level, there are two basic considerations when thinking about togetherness: association and commonality. Association is the active component of being together, and should be understood expansively to include anything which involves two or more people engaging in something jointly. A conversation held one time between two people who never meet or speak again is an association, albeit a very transient one, and so is the Catholic Church.

Commonality is simply some shared characteristic, including shared interests. It can be a basis of association, but does not need to be. People can agree to associate for an enormous variety of reasons. One can join an activist organization, for example, because one wants to change the world, or because one is lonely, or simply because a job offer is extended and found to be adequate. Three individuals with one of these motives each might have very little commonality other than the fact of their being a part of the same organization. And the basis of their association, in this case, would not be commonality at all.

Commonality can also be a source of something people call "community" even when there's no specific association they have in mind. People who happen to enjoy a particular music subgenre may not have thought of themselves as belonging to a community at all, until someone invoked a phrase such as "the punk community" or "the hip hop community." These phrases may encourage people to self-consciously identify as members of these imagined communities, and perhaps take measures to associate with others who feel the same way--but it also may not. Simply having something in common does not imply association, nor need association imply much in common beyond the association itself.

Romantics and communitarians in the tradition of Tönnies are dismissive of forms of togetherness except where there is a very strong, historically rooted association with a very high degree of commonality among its membership. Against this, I want to insist that even a single conversation between two people can have a lasting impact and be deeply meaningful for both of them. And online forms of association tend to be venues for conversation between individuals and in groups.