Community and Diversity

What does community mean?  Merriam-Webster defines community as a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.  When the author of My Freshman Year interviewed students about their feelings on being a community, most said they felt like they had a community within the university.  The author defined their communities as a network of personal friends.  To me, that is one kind of community.  Communities can be defined differently by different people.  The author was then intrigued and wanted to know who these networks of friends were formed and how activities within these groups were coordinated.  According to the author, the student networks, like family relations, are ego based (Nathan, 2005, pg. 56).  What do you think she means by that--ego based?  She goes on to mention that no two people share the exact same group of friends and that is what she means by ego based.  I don't get it.  I understand that communities are built by people and who they interact with.  She mentions that two people are part of the same network, but they separately have their own friends and usually the names are not identical.  Isn't that usually the way it works.  My son has a particular group of friends that have been together since they were about 10 and 11 years old--they are now 24 and 25 years old.  They are a very tight knit group, but they each have other friends that they may hang out with individually or separate from this group.  That's just how it is.  The author stated that she was very surprised that eight of the fourteen students she interviewed had one or more people within their personal networks that they had known previously from their high school or their hometown.  I don't find this surprising.  I went to college with several people from my high school--we decided on the school together and paired up as roommates.  My son and his friends did the same thing.  Isn't this normal?  Most likely, students from the same geographic location will attend some of the same colleges in that area or region.  Another surprise element for her was that classroom contacts did not figure much into the social networks of students. Of the students interviewed, less than one fourth of them had met a member of their social network in an academic class or other activity.  The author states that once the networks were formed, usually by the end of their freshman year, the students tended to stay with their groups and sparse contact with others.  She further states that the way the social life is formed affects issues of diversity.  No kidding...are you surprised by these results?