“We spend more and more time online, but feel less and less connected.”

via 10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life – Alexandra Samuel – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

Thanks to @ethan (Ethan Zuckerman) for link to this editorial in the Stabroek News, a paper in Guyana (a nation on the northern coast of South America): “Elsewhere Communities.” An impressively literary editorial, but I’m not sure there’s an argument that holds – or even an argument being made. Kenner was talking about imagination, and transformational creativity, not just about talking to people who are different from us. That’s important, too, and Global Voices is trying to do something worthwhile, but it isn’t about the Elsewhere Community, but about bringing the Everywhere Community together, to bridge divides and understand other perspectives. Or so it seems to me.

Thanks to another blogger for this link to an article in New York Magazine: Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb: New York Times’ Political columnist David Brooks changes his mind on suburbs.

Anyone interested in community and community building should have this book: A pattern language: towns, buildings … – Google Books.

I spotted the book How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance at BookExpo last year. It’s the story of urban school revived by a group of committed parents, not a book about the importance of walking to school. I like both ideas. The challenge of improving rural schools is quite different in some ways, but I think walking is a vital part of the picture because schools should be grounded in a community. That’s the way it used to be here, but after the big school battles I was involved in 10 years ago, we now have an expensive, remote “campus” and empty buildings in the center of town. The social and environmental consequences of this are something I’ll be writing about, and we’ll look at the role of neighborhood schools in creating cohesive and lively community centers.

Walking down to celebrate Rachel’s passing the driving test with lunch at Bizen, we were hailed from across the road by a man in a parked car. “Did you pass?” he called out. I didn’t recognize him and couldn’t imagine that he was talking to us. “Did she pass?” he said again. I noticed the teenage girl standing on the sidewalk behind him, also looking at us and smiling, and that it was a white sedan. The girl testing before Rachel had been in a white car. I hadn’t seen her or her parent, but they had seen us. We all nodded happily and exchanged congratulations.

There is probably no easier place on earth to take a driving test than here in Great Barrington, but it was nerve-wracking nonetheless. As the “sponsor,” I had to sit in the backseat but keep my mouth firmly shut, “or I’ll fail, Mom!” I actually considered putting something in my mouth to keep myself quiet.  Rachel must be a true Londoner: she learned to drive late and reluctantly and doesn’t really want to have to do it. But as she might end up working somewhere much more remote than this, where people drive all-terrain trucks, and she wants to be able to go to the theatre this summer and to the airport and train station, she buckled down to it.

We’ve been talking about the long saga of her learning to drive. One favorite moment was when I discovered she was studying the British driving manual without realizing what it was. All the signs were different, and the illustrations were backwards. I guess that wasn’t the best start.

Survey Finds Citations Growing Narrower as Journals Move Online, Jennifer Couzin, 08/07/18, Science : 329.

A sociologist argues on page 395 of this week’s issue of Science that making scholarly articles available online has narrowed citations to more recent and less diverse articles than before–the opposite of what most people expected. (…) Oddly, “our studies show the opposite,” says Carol Tenopir,(…). She (…), have surveyed thousands of scientists over the years for their scholarly reading habits. They found that scientists are reading older articles and reading more broadly–at least one article a year from 23 different journals, compared with 13 journals in the late 1970s.

I turned to the article on “Citation Communities” in Berkshire’s Encyclopedia of Community (Christensen et al., editors, Sage 2004) to get the background, and also talked to scholars who understand better than I exactly how important citations are in the academic world. My personal concern is that people should know about similar work being done – because we learn from one another, and because the idea of vast amounts of research money being spent on duplicate efforts appalls me. But scholars care abaout citations for practical reasons, too: being cited can help them when they have job reviews, and raises their status in their academic department and knowledge community.

I have been thinking about the need for updates to the Encyclopedia of Community, given the many changes that have taken place since 2004. This is certainly one article that needs to take account of the changes of the last six years, and to assess the research that’s been done so far to determine the effects of online publishing and online academic social networking services (which bubble up now and then: I take a look, am awed by the grant money they’ve managed to get hold of, and never hear about them again). I’m posting the article “Citation Communities” from the Encyclopedia of Community here, for your reading pleasure. Some cool subheadings, by the way: “Intercitation and Cocitation” and “Intellectual Versus Social Ties.” Comments are most welcome.

Read more »

This is one of the obvious facts that passed me by until I came across an article by Michael Idov in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Bringing the Buzz Back to the Café: Once they plotted revolutions, now they’re typing blogs. Today’s cafe society is a weak decaf.” I don’t go to coffee shops all that much, but I spent a couple of hours at Grounded on Jane Street recently, online of course, and now feel chagrined as I realize that I was just another laptopper:

The laptoppers hog the tables, but they do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice. They make it a solitary one, and it’s a different kind of solitude from the stance sung by Hemingway. You’re not just alone—you’re in another universe entirely, inaccessible to anyone not directly behind you.

No good calling something a public space just because there are lots of people there. Fascinating to consider how we became so capable of being alone together.

I started this post in the autumn of 2008 and it’s wrong. I thought that online social networking would level out because people would be too busy trying to keep their jobs or find new ones to fool around at Facebook. With the cash squeeze, I thought that free social networking sites would have their venture money restricted.  I did not realize how powerful the need for connection would be and that even something as frivolous as Twitter could help people get through tough times. That’s right, I think the main motivator of all this listing and posting isn’t business but personal connection. Friends tell me they get some good ideas from Twitter posts, but if you look at it in terms of cost/benefit, there’s no way Twitter is a better use of time than some focused research or a call to the right person. The small group of people I follow are good sources, actually. They seem to have a lot more free time than I do and  I am glad to benefit from their reading. But I get no real sense of community from this – it’s too disjointed and superficial. But other people do find it helpful and warming, and in tough times who can criticize?

Here’s the post I started six months ago:

One good thing about the economic crisis is that there isn’t going to be so much money going into new “community” sites so i should get so many invitations to connect on yet another platform. You know, these e-mails that try to get me to login  to see who among the people I vaguely know has connected to whom (people I don’t know at all).  I belong, technically, to Plaxo and LinkedIn and Facebook, but I don’t in any way try to keep up with people there. Then there’s the cyber-social stalking. A guy I once interviewed for a job has sent me more requests to connect that anyone I know. I finally had enough and responded, through Facebook, “Ernie, I have received more requests to connect from you than from my friends. Please please take me off your various lists–no hard feelings, but I just have too much else to do. No more mail please! Good luck to you, Karen.” He wrote back quickly, “No worries, my fault and it won’t happen again.” But I got something else from him not long ago.

At the office we’ve been editing some TV interviews I did 20 years ago, when I was a young mum in London, and new author of one of the first books about green living. My daughter Rachel, who is graduating from college, was then a chubbynewborn who modeled cloth nappies for my interviews and photo shoots. I asked whether she minded our posting the clips on YouTube. “If you don’t mind being laughed at,” she said. It’s my English accent she finds most ridiculous, but she says the hair and clothes are bad, too.

And she’s right, but I still think it’ll be fun to have some historic clips on my company’s Sustainability Project website. Here’s a bit about that last year in London:

Spring flowers were early, but by March the mornings were frosty again and the days dark and damp. “Funny weather, innit?” said the telephone operator one day, “I think it must be that ozone you keep hearing about.” When the sun did emerge, it shocked me after the long dark weeks.  It showed up the circles under my eyes and the stains on the children’s clothes. I tried to relish my new life and its many possibilities. But I had too little money to be sanguine about any of my choices working out smoothly, and I felt bereft of some of the things I had given my heart to for almost 10 years. When I was 20, the view from Waterloo Bridge – east to St Paul’s and the City of London, west to Westminster and the Houses of Parliment – had choked me with joy.  Now I couldn’t see its beauties.  I knew I should enjoy it, since once we left I would only ever be in London as a visitor, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t just that trips to museums with two small children were no fun, what with trips to the restroom and trying to keep them quiet on the bus.  I felt uncomfortable going out alone in the evening, anxious about the walk back up the Grove to the empty flat. My neighbors were wonderful – we could drop in, and they would ply us with tea, and even feed us. One friend who had two children and two foster children used to dish up mounds of fish fingers and chips and peas – all from the freezer – and Tom would wolf down more than it seemed possible for a 4-year-old to eat. I worried more that people would think I wasn’t feeding them than about the fact that they seemed to love the kind of food they never got at home.