But the countless, ever-multiplying communities of today are something different: not collections of humans functioning in unison but random assortments of people who do the same things, like the same things, hate the same things or believe the same things. Life online is absolutely full of communities. There are fan communities, hobbyist communities, communities for users or enthusiasts of every consumer product imaginable. Every interest, every circumstance and point of identification, it seems, benefits by gathering under this feel-good umbrella word, which instantly puts a friendly gloss on every activity. People who interact are a community. People who don’t interact but share some quality or belief become a community. People who are lumped into communities by other communities are communities. “Community” makes everything sound better. It makes “the activist community” sound approachable; it makes “the skin-care community” sound important; it makes “the Christian community” sound inclusive and kind; it makes “the medical community” sound folksy and skilled at the bedside; it makes “the homeless community” sound voluntary; it makes “the gun rights community” sound humanistic; it makes “the tech community” sound like good citizens.

The tech community, of course, is partly responsible for this explosion. Platforms like Facebook, which exist for the express purpose of “creating community,” turn out to be in the business of exploiting the communities they’ve created for the benefit of those outside (the business community, the strategic communications community, the Moldovan hacker community). They invite members to “participate,” but not, in the end, to make decisions together; the largest rewards, and the greatest powers, stay private. The company lays claim to everything of value that can be extracted from the assembled group. Nobody feels any personal kinship with a “community” of billions of fellow Facebook users; only people who work for Facebook would ever describe things this way. But this communal language maintains the illusion that we’re all in this together, working for something that will benefit us all — neatly keeping the focus on the things being “liked” and “shared,” rather than the ones being mined or sold.

The psychologists David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis outlined four basic elements of community in a 1986 article titled “Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory.” There was membership, or “the feeling of belonging”; influence, or the “sense of mattering, of making a difference to a group”; reinforcement, or “the feeling that members’ needs will be met”; and shared emotional connection, or the “belief that members have shared and will share history, common places, time together and similar experiences.”

McMillan and Chavis also cited an important distinction between two types of community that have long coexisted. One is geographical — neighborhood, town, city — and the other is “relational,” concerned with the interconnections among people. Our sense of community seems to shift steadily among these very different modes of thinking. Over the decades, its meaning has lost the precision of city limits and has expanded to accommodate groups with shared values, planned and intentional organizations and a general sense of interpersonal connectedness. In 2018, it feels as if community is about being recognized as a certain kind of person — when it’s not merely about fitting into a broad category. In other words, our sense of community is less and less about being from someplace and more about being like someone.