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.