Review book reading, management team facilitation, a chat with the stranger next to me on the flight home, an 8 am web-based meeting I attend from my physical location in the neighborhood coffee shop--those have been the identities of some of my past few hours' worth of engagement(s) with a sampling of the communities that form and inform "my community." A decade ago, a library world peer argued with me that narrative has limitations; she was willing to admit to the universe of narrative comics, but games--nope. We dropped the argument then, and today I see that the shortsightedness was as much mine as hers. I continue to hold that games create narrative but, way more important, is that effective narrative--the book, the game, the film, the story--is effective when it is subject to engagement, just as conversations become true only when each conversant listens as well as speaks.
While working in Canada, I got to see just how basic the difference is between the American (US) cultural posture of community identity is from the Canadian. Americans prioritize their individualism, while Canadians perceive themselves as relevant parts of a "we." Blood mobiles that park in neighborhoods to encourage public donation in the US may sit unvisited for stretches of time--unless an identified individual from that community is publicly championed as the beneficiary of walkby donors. In Canada, reservations were doled out for appointments before the upcoming visit of the blood donation station to the library, yet the hall outside the donation room overflowed with those waiting to donate. Blood donation is viewed as an element of community support that underlies any local member's cultural identity. In short, engagement is communal rather than individualized and selective.
My new argument for my decade old interlocutor around the omnipresence of narrative is that it is only in the act of engagement that narratives, information, customer service, curation and any other
library-esque value is realized. Library service that suppresses engagement, demanding or at best suggesting that the "user" be a passive consumer, subvert the engagement required for any individual to understand her or his community value as well as the value of her or his various communities to the individual's own health and welfare.
