Because we know that we can always get on Facebook, or tweet or text, the very manner in which we are interacting in the physical world has changed. We are less engaged and less committed, less dependent upon this moment of being together for our sense of connection and emotional nourishment. Physical interaction has become an impediment to our engaging with technology. We have to hurry up and finish with the people in front of us so that we can get back to tweeting and texting to people who are somewhere else. The system has flipped: People are now the distraction and our on-line world, the main stage.

via Nancy Colier: Virtual Community: Can We Survive It?.

While Black has been fending media calls, Shutts and her family have been fending calls from longtime customers who had moved away but are now planning pilgrimage’s back to support Chagrin Falls’ favorite hardware store.

That sense of community, she said, is what her family will take away from Black’s “cash mob” event, not the day’s profits, which the Shutts have so far declined to release.

“It doesn’t matter about the money, “she said. “Just to see the community and my family’s faces light up like this, it’s worth everything.”

via ‘Cash-Mob’ Creates Movie-Like Fairy Tale for Family Behind Ohio Hardware Store – ABC News.

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.

* * * * *

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.

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.

 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.

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?

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.