The community we create

An extraordinarily full weekend since I last posted, all of which I seriously need to write about; highlights include awesome party at Chez Melchert and another awesome party for my son Nik's seventh birthday. These posts will come later. In the meantime, I wanted to bounce a question off of everyone that I've been pondering this morning.

So I was reading my f'list this morning, which, like yesterday morning and the morning before, is roughly 85% Harry Potter-related. And as I read, I realized that the release of this last book is a connecting thread that cuts across every LJ subgroup I come into contact with—I mean, everyone has something to say about it, even if it's simply being grinchy about the whole thing. We are in the middle of one of the few times when the LJ community (using the broader definition of the C word, as opposed to, say, dot_poly_snark or cat_macro) can actually be called a community, rather than an aggregation of smaller subcommunities, cliques and social circles. Harry Potter and the Media Circus Deathly Hallows has become a unifying event.

I asked myself, then, what have been the other unifying events on LJ? I can certainly name a few: The 48-hour service outage a few years ago. Strikeout '07. Blog Like It's the End of the World. Even (arguably) What's-Her-Face who killed her mom, then blogged about it. From there, though, I get somewhat stuck.

So I ask you: What would you say have been the unifying events among LiveJournal users over the last five years or so?