Jane Fonda Says, “Community Means Power”

A lot of people have been quoting Jane Fonda’s speech from the SAG Awards last week when she said, “Woke just means you give a damn about people.” True and good, but I was more interested in her succinct but mighty quote that came later in the speech: “Community means power.”

The rise of technology has been beneficial in many ways but perhaps not so much in terms of community, which is vital — especially during dark times. One of my favorite non-fiction books is Nicholas Carr’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. This was published in 2010, and he already had a finger on the pulse of what was coming. I keep waiting for a sequel, because he must be going out of his mind with how things have changed since then. (Just this year, he published Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. I haven’t read it yet, but I must. It sounds sequelly enough for me!)

I’ve written and spoken before about how I saw a change in my students over the decade of the 2010s, from phoning to texting, and getting lazier with their research. And then came the isolation of the pandemic. And then came AI, which is plaguing teachers everywhere. I got out of academia just in time.

We do have our online communities, mainly on Facebook, which lends itself to that more than Instagram, X, Bluesky, and…