Dave Cohn, the force of energy behind Spot.us is hosting this month’s Carnival of Journalism. He’s after predictions for 2009.

Well, I don’t really have a prediction of the “Someone will discover a business model for Twitter” variety. It being the season of reflection and all, it’s more an observation.

It seems to me that we have talked for years now of technology and communities without ever stopping to ask what – if anything – might bind them together. The assumption is that it is conversation, that the connection simply enables and – lo and behold! – the community pops into existence. Well, conversation is not enough. You have to do something.

If you don’t believe me, ask Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In May 1940, as German forces poured into France, Saint-Exupéry was flying reconnaissance missions with the Group 2-33 of the French Armée de l’Air.

Reconnaissance is a means of discovering information on which to plan action. Group 2-33 carried on providing that information, even as it ceased to matter. Saint-Exupéry, a pioneering aviator, was very much a technologist.

But the story of France’s defeat that he tells in Pilote de Guerre, published in the middle of the Second World War, is not a story of technology:

I am doing my job like a conscientious worker. Which doesn’t alter the fact that I feel myself to be a pilot of defeat. I feel drenched in defeat. Defeat oozes out of every pore, and in my hands I hold two tokens of it.

For both my throttle controls are frozen. The cold has turned them into two useless stumps of metal. It presents me with a serious problem. So whatever happens, I am forced to keep on flying full throttle. Meanwhile, the pitch of my propellers, which acts as a kind of brake on the engine revs, is controlled by an automatic limiter.

If for any reason I have to dive, I shall be unable to cut my engine speed or increase my pitch. As I fall through space the torrential force of air through my propellers will very likely increase the rotation of my engines to the point where they explode.

During a flight over the German tank parks surrounding Arras, Saint-Ex the writer reflects on his community, France – on its defeat and dissolution.

In the course of his reflections he touches on the nature and substance of our imagined communities, and on the weakness of language.

Man becomes the man of a country, of a group, of an aircraft, of a civilization, of a religion. But if we are to clothe ourselves in these higher things we must begin by creating them within ourselves. The thing of which we claim to be a part is created within us not by words but by acts alone. This thing is not subject to the empire of language, but only to the empire of action. Our Humanism neglected acts…

The essential act has a name. That name is sacrifice.

The writing came after the mission, and after the flying. Technology can create connections – but if we want new communities then it’s actions not words that will build them.