10/1 Reading

Belonging, one of the criteria of Howard’s RIBS in Design to Thrive, focuses on explaining what it means to belong to a community and what developers can do to foster the feeling of belonging: “This chapter explains that belonging is a sense of one’s “social presence” in a community; it’s a feeling or awareness of the shared bonds a member has with others in the group.” That being said, belonging isn't just about you knowing you’re a part of something, but that it also includes the feeling and others in the community are affected by your presence and acknowledge it whether openly or not.

The ways that Howard outlines that provide the necessary belonging criteria are as follows: shared mythologies, shared stories of origin, shared symbols, and the cultural codes embedded in those symbols.

Ceremonial speeches of belonging include initiation rituals or, the ritual needed in order to gain acceptance into a particular community. Howard demonstrates using Navy Seals and their bonding experience through the challenges of “Hell Week” and way before that, the initiation rituals performed by the boys of Sparta, the fierce section of Ancient Greece. In order to transition from boys to men in the community, they were starved and forced to obtain food by their own accord mostly through theft from those of lower status.

When members become members after any sort of initiation rituals, sometimes communities will have in place rituals dealing with leveling up within ranks. There exist upsides and downsides to the leveling up concept. For example, the Boy Scouts and their levels consisting of Scout, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life and finally, Eagle. These levels encourage and motivate boys to reach higher and obtain the ranks of those before them. Downsides to this method include the creation of jealousy among the boys and that they will feel “disenfranchised and leave the community.”

This chapter reminded me of my days as a part of an online private forum in high school as I mentioned in last week's post. A group of my friends created a private forum where we were given a chance to personalize tag lines, pictures, etc with whatever we wanted. The forum would track our total post count and we would receive blocks that were displayed by our tag name on posts. I was determined to gain the little red blocks because to me, that meant I was an important person on this forum. A top contributor and a valuable member of (our little) society. Looking back, it’s hard to realize I spent so much time on that forum, but it fostered a sense of belonging I am reading about today in this class. We knew the rules and how we were supposed to act. The set up was familiar and enjoyable. Maybe it’s not so hard to realize why my time went there afterall.