Line of Site: The Quiet Bloom of Online Community

In the surge of individual identity, communal solidarity flourishes on the Internet 

By Kylie Heider

There is a time in our lives before the internet and a time after it. There is a memory somewhere within our adolescence that we can pinpoint as the moment when our burgeoning selves merged with our digital selves, like some strange cyborg Siamese twin, and we held their hand and never looked back. The frontier of the Internet became our neighborhood where we grew on the same jokes and the same music, reading and seeing the same things. As a collective, our identities have been shaped by these infinite worlds of information and ideologies; our humanity diversified  in the weird and wonderful panopticon of the online.

With the expansion of the Internet, a new wave of community has been fostered in a manner that was previously unprecedented. Pre-social media, community was limited by the physical location of where one lived and visited. Consequently, members of ostracized communities that had lived in such isolation, typically queer communities or communities of color, flocked to cities to find solidarity. As human connection expands online, this migration became less necessary. Our networks of common identities grew, and we were able to find kinship when geography failed to provide it for us. 

Personally, growing up in a place where very few people share my racial identity, I never felt represented in my geographical home. Consequently, it still feels strange to call Minnesota my home. It wasn’t until I found online enclaves that celebrated people that came from similar backgrounds did I feel seen and realized. The Internet has democratized access to the individual point of view, inherently diversifying representative experiences in media. When we see ourselves and others like us reflected online, we’re reminded of something too often forgotten: that there are others like us, that we are not alone.