Sue Halpern’s articles in the New York Review of Books are thought-provoking introductions to aspects of science and technological development that I need to know about, and this essay is relevant to human relationships, the subject of A Smaller Circle:

Anonymity, which flourishes where there is no individual accountability, is one of its key features, and behind it, meanness, antipathy, and cruelty have a tendency to rush right in. As the sociologist Sherry Turkle observes: “Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts that we find useful, comforting, or amusing.”

Here is Chorost describing the wonders of a neural-networked friendship: “Having brainlike computers would greatly simplify the process of extracting information from one brain and sending it to another. Suppose you have such a computer, and you’re connected with another person via the World Wide Mind…. You see a cat on the sidewalk in front of you. Your rig…sees activity in a large percentage of the neurons constituting your brain’s invariant representation of a cat. To let your friend know you’re seeing a cat, it sends three letters of information—CAT—to the other person’s implanted rig. That person’s rig activates her brain’s invariant representation of a cat, and she sees it. Or rather, to be more accurate, she sees a memory of a cat that is taken from her own neural circuitry….”

Now, many important details would be missing. The cat’s breed, its color, its posture, what it’s doing, and so forth…. But it would convey a key piece of information: your friend would know that you are seeing a cat. Of course, if you called or texted or e-mailed your friend, she would also know that you were seeing a cat, and she’d know what it looked like, and what it was doing, and that it was a significant enough event in your life that you were telling her about it. Do we want to know every time someone we know sees a cat?

via Mind Control & the Internet — www.nybooks.com — Readability.

I was commissioned to write a book called A Smaller Circle: The Search for Community in 1990 by a London publisher, Random Century, part of Random House. The acquisitions editor described it as “Small Is Beautiful [the 1970s bestseller by E. F. Schumacher] by a woman, and the catalog description read:

* * * * *

A Smaller Circle: The Search for Community

“The Jane Austen of the alternative world”” –Kirkpatrick Sale

The quest for community – for a smaller circle in which to share and grow – may be the quintessential search of our time. In this moving and exploratory narrative, a young mother with American roots and European experience undertakes that quest, led on by the sense that a life which is simple, sustainable and satisfying must be achievable. Passionate, perceptive and irreverent, A Smaller Circle will challenge all who ask themselves whether, and in what conditions, community is possible.

* * * * *

My job therefore was to find the perfect community, fast, and write the story. I was 32 years old and had lived in London for over 10 years. My first book, Home Ecology, had been published the year before and was doing quite well until McDonalds threatened a lawsuit as part of what became McLibel. With a crushing mortgage, faced with Margaret Thatcher’s infamous “poll tax” (officially known as the Community Charge), my quest didn’t work out as planned, and I did not finish writing the book. But my fascination with community has grown over the years, as I’ve got to know small-town New England and the West Village of New York City, and worked with hundreds of experts from all over the world on the Encyclopedia of Community (published by Sage in 2004), and traveled and worked in China. This blog explore the subject of community in books and in real life, in my stories and in the stories of many other people.

After rereading The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community over the weekend, I am paying more attention to diners. I might visit Adrien’s Diner in Pittsfield – eggs and bacon are the tough part of doing this type of research – and there’s a famous diner in Lee I might catch on the way back to Great Barrington one morning.

Operating daily from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., Adrien’s is also open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., providing pre-dawn meals that were once a staple of diners, now a rarity.

“Some nights this place is packed, because we’re one of the few places serving so late,” Bill McGovern said.

He noted it’s also a safe haven for enjoying an overnight meal as customers are respectful of one another.

“There’s a big misconception that being so close to several bars, we have trouble,” McGovern said. “I can’t remember the last time we had a fight.”

via 55 years later, Pittsfield diner is still all in the family – Berkshire Eagle Online.

I just went back to something I wrote four years ago in Shanghai, working on a letter about my early days in publishing and how they shaped what Berkshire Publishing Group is becoming today, and found that I was writing then about community as well as about my October letter’s subject: the “two cultures” and how we are working to bring this great divide through interdisciplinary collaboration. I’ve also been thinking about the protests near Wall Street in New York, only a couple miles from where I sit on a miraculously warm and bright October day, and about the role our sense of community (as well as the lack of a sense of community) plays in both the protests and the financial system that is at issue. Here’s what I commented in 2007 at the Berkshire Blog:

 When I attend events with lots of Internet-savvy people, like this forum in Shanghai on Nurturing and Commercializing Online Communities, I’m struck by a new type of “two cultures” divide. There’s a business aspect, which I’ll write about later, but what struck me first were the casual references to “living digitally” and “virtual life.” Myself, I don’t think there is such a thing as a virtual life, though I’m happy to use online interaction to enrich my life and work. We have only one life, and our connections with other people are amongst the most important determinants of our personal happiness and our accomplishment and legacy.

Berkshire Blog by Karen Christensen » Two cultures, new cultures.

I’ve been baffled by Foursquare. Reading this list makes me wonder about my understanding of people. I have spent the weekend in New York & Great Barrington with very interesting people & have no desire to publicize the details. And I simply don’t have time to spare. Perhaps there are people giving up Fourquare who would like to do some unpaid work for Berkshire Publishing? It would be more fun and more rewarding, I suspect. Hutong Weekend: Top Ten Signs that it is Time to Leave Foursquare « Silicon Hutong.

My usual walk is to Lake Mansfield, through the neighborhood we call “The Hill.” I occasionally see people but not many. It’s a quiet neighborhood, and even quieter along the lake until you get to the beach (busy this time of year). But this morning we needed milk so I walked down the hill to Main Street, to the Berkshire Coop. I had other on-foot errands (dropping boxes of cereal the no one likes at the food pantry and returning hangers to the drycleaners) I could do. More important, I saw two friends for the first time in months. Diane has a gift for being outside her house at important times: the first time she introduced herself, she told me about a yoga class that turned out to be transformative; later, she was getting out of her car one early evening as I walked slowly up the hill. It was the day after I told my then-husband I wanted a divorce and sadness had struck. I was realizing just what a change I had undertaken, and how lonely the road might be. Meeting her that evening was a bit of serendipity I was grateful for and will, I hope, never forget.

Today, I again learned something from our encounter, brief as it was (unlike the post-divorce conversation, which quickly moved from Castle Street to Diane’s attic study, where we sat on a mattress in a window alcove with drinks and Kleenex). “Welcome back,” she said. Back?, I thought, but I’ve been here. For almost a whole week straight, in fact. And I’d been here before that, after I flew back to New York from Beijing on the 12^th of July, for most of each week. When I’m in Great Barrington, though, I’m usually working. My daughter does most of the grocery shopping and my walks take me to the most remote spots I can find, so who’s to know that I’m in town even when I am? But this neighborhood, I thought, is home, and it bothered me that my friend and neighbor think of me as always being somewhere else.

On the way back from the Coop I ran into Tim, another friend I haven’t seen for a long time. “How’ve you been?” seemed a little feeble, considering the complications of his work with the Community Development Corporation. “Things are fine,” was not exactly what I wanted to convey, either, about everything that’s happened in my life in the past year. He wanted to know how my book project was going and whether I’d written anything about the local development issues we’d talked about over a sunny lunch at the Coop. “I haven’t got there yet,” I explained, and we promised to meet soon. “There’s plenty more to tell,” he said, and I’m sure there is. This, too, felt like a kind of homecoming.

But as I walked up the hill, I remembered an evening last summer when I arrived in New York after having been away for what seemed like a particularly long stretch. As I trundled into the lobby with my little pull-back, our favorite doorman said, “Welcome home,” and at that moment that was exactly what I felt, that I was back at home in the West Village.

This is my quandary: Can I really be at home in more than one place? Will I ever be truly at home?

I hadn’t realized that I need to write about the acid house rave movement in my book on community! This is a fascinating article though, from the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph (not owned by Murdoch but traditionally conservative/Tory, with very large readership):

Rather than eating out in traditional restaurants, Britons will increasingly share meals at home with neighbours and other members of their community. There will also be an escalation of informal open-air ‘street food’ gatherings, where the collective experience and sense of togetherness will be similar to the acid house rave movement of the late 1980s, the report says.

via ‘Food raves’ are the future of eating, new report claims – Telegraph.

Lewis Mumford appeared on the cover of TIME on 18 April 1938 (click here to view), after the publication of his first book on the city, The Culture of Cities. Read the review here. He published a second, The City in History, in 1961, reviewed in TIME with the title “Books: Necropolis Revisited” (read here). I spent many afternoons in the Mumfords’ country house and got to know Lewis through long conversations with his widow, Sophia, and I’ve read his books and gone through many of his letters and photographs. But I had never seen him speak until a few days ago when someone I met at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation told me I could find him on YouTube. It’s a revelation! Click here to listen to Lewis Mumford talk about the city in history.

I use Google Alerts a lot, for important colleagues and my publishing company’s star authors and editors, and also for a few phrases relevant to my research on community. No question that the phrase “search for community” brings up more results than “search for community” – and not surprisingly so, if you look at how and where “sense of community” is being used. I have been finding some great stories this way and am including the results here for just a few items I’ve received in the last few days. Notice that all these items focus on community in real life, not online. (Yes, I know that that distinction rubs some people the wrong way – “online is real, too” – but it’s what I’m sticking with for the moment.)

My Turn: Does Burlington School Board action reflect the will of city residents? BurlingtonFreePress.com The plan proposed changes the entire city’s sense of community, neighborhoods, walking vs. busing to school and the general expectations involved in purchasing a home (the largest personal investment most families make) in every neighborhood in … See all stories on this topic »

A daily diaspora, a scattered street Boston Globe “It’s frustrating, especially for those of us who really believe in an urban environment and the great things it’s going to provide us — that we can walk everywhere, have a sense of community, go to museums,” said Greenwood. … See all stories on this topic »

CSAs keep locals from having to guess where dinner came from The Newark Advocate As stated on the website localharvest.org, an online hub for finding local CSAs, farms and farmers markets, “Many times, the idea of shared risk is part of what creates a sense of community among members, and between members and the farmers. … See all stories on this topic »

Casey Anthony’s trial is one hot ticket CNN Spend eight or nine hours in line with other people and a sense of community grows. People give their neighbors nicknames, usually based on a hometown or number in line. As they discuss the case in minute detail, they give the lawyers nicknames, … See all stories on this topic » CNN

Crosswalks are increasingly deadly for the elderly Los Angeles Times … area for pedestrians, but Leaman said for elderly people who no longer drive, there is no other option. “Things are so close together. Things are convenient. You have much better medical care here, and there’s a sense of community,” she said. … See all stories on this topic »

I liked this response to a blog post urging people to say hello to 5 strangers today. It’s good to be reminded that these things are cultural and regional, not ingrained. We can learn to be more community minded! I admit, though, that I was startled when someone in my apartment building in New York actually started talking to me in the elevator one day, first about shoe laces that won’t stay tied, then about the party he was going to, the friends he was hanging out with and didn’t want to leave…. But I could get used to having people talk to me, I think.

When we lived outside of Seattle for 10 years there were people on our street who never left the house, and when we would walk in the evenings wouldn’t say more than hi. When we moved back to the south we moved to a similar suburban neighborhood, and had people knocking within hours of the moving truck showing up, and kids running through our house “helping” to unpack. When our daughter was ill and in the hospital we had neighbors we only knew in passing mowing our yard, and bringing us meals. Sadly it took 9/11 in Seattle for people at my work to realize they didn’t know the people on the street they lived on for years. I always thought it sad, as a southerner, that it took such a tragedy to bring folks together, and it was eye-opening to see the difference when we moved back to the south 9 months later. I’ll take on your challenge, we need community.

via Say Hello To 5 Strangers Today | One Green Generation