It is becoming increasingly popular for people in our day and age to reach out to the escapist avenues technology has brought to our society within the last twenty years. In Japan there is a culture of people called “otaku” who are characterized by their extreme passion for anime. This culture is unique in that the people who make up this otaku population actually rarely ever see each other. This population gathers together at most a few times year (in contrast to a church group, for example) to dress up as their favorite anime characters. They spend the rest of the year engaged in an ironically isolationist hobby that is the reason for the community’s existence - watching anime.
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“Community” is no longer a constricting entity that prescribes how one lives one’s life. Rather the opposite has come to fruition; it is the individuals that prescribe the existence of the community. Community has become a looser organization that simply gathers people who have lives that already have overlapping similarities. Because of this decreased commitment to modern communities, people have tended to associate themselves with more communities than ever before. Rather than one’s identity being a one-word catch phrase, people can describe themselves through a complex and rich diversity of phrases. ROCK ON!
