New World Communities
What's the most significant factor in whether or not you'll be friends with someone? Guess what - it isn't shared interests or even mutual physical attraction. It's proximity. There is actually some truth behind the Onion article "18-Year-Old Miraculously Finds Soul Mate In Hometown." The Internet however, is poised to break this rule, and with it the way that we build our cities and communities. In the future, your best friends won't live nearby, and your meeting places may not exist at all.
The southern town where I grew up in the late nineties is home to about ten thousand people. It wasn't quite the small town where everyone knows everything about their neighbors’ lives, but everyone in town still went to the same high school. But I reached out and, through old fashioned methods, slowly built a social network of like-minded people from surrounding towns. We killed hours in diners, playing cards, or simply wandering around like so many teenagers. When I went to a nearby college, this slow process started all over again, this time constrained to a small campus of 5,500 students. But by the time I got my degree, I had once more built a circle of tightly linked friends, distinct from my hometown friends. But those networks oddly collided when a high school friend began to date a college friend – and they met through the Internet.
Up until very recently, I refused to initiate friendships on the Internet. My reasoning remains that if you meet people online, you miss the tiny social cues, like body language and tone of voice, that are crucial to building friendships with people you’re pretty sure are not crazy. For all the virtues of annihilating distance, there is a lot to be said for social connections made through the fabric of day-to-day existence. But as the years have passed, the Internet has continued to short-circuit this fabric, which is how my two friends met via an online dating service. This is becoming ever more evident in New York City, my home for the past five years.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described her view of ideal city life, as viewed from her Hudson Street sidewalk in Greenwich Village. Small businesses would open up and keep an eye on the street, helping to keep the neighborhood safe, since the owners would instinctively know which faces belonged and which did not. Likening the fabric of city life to an intricate dance, Jacobs saw how it was threatened by the burgeoning crime and urban decay of the coming decade, the sixties. But now this intertwined urban fabric is being threatened from the other direction. As beautiful as Jane Jacob's ideal of the closely intertwined life of the sidewalk may be, the urban fabric of our lives continues to be threatened by technological and demographic change. Fresh Direct removes the need to go to a grocery store or a pharmacy. Amazon.com and iTunes provide fierce competition for local bookstores and record stores. Why go out of my way to buy the latest Wolf Parade record when I find instant gratification for $8 through Amazon's music store? The personal recommendations of the knowledgeable bookseller or record clerk have given way to the anonymous star-ratings of fellow customers on websites. Bookstores and record stores continue to close and the daily face-to-face interaction that forms the basis of urban communities is being lost.
To be sure, many internet sites are also trying to make up for this loss, by building online communities. Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn helps to unite residents in their long and difficult fight against a large development that would have been anathema to Jacobs - the kind of construction which fails to actually support its community. But when it comes to the small-bore work of seeing getting to know your neighbors, the internet simply falls short. Queens West, a long standing forum for the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens, has a senescent web board which barely sparks to life, simply catering to the real-estate concerns of the high-rise condo residents who are new to the neighborhood.
However, when it comes to arguing and debating, the internet will always be more ferocious than real life. Just look at Gawker, a site where anonymous commenters (and not-so-anonymous other bloggers) snipe and yell from the wings, writing scathing missives they would never say to someone in person. We need to reconcile this disconnect, the anonymity that at once separates people (from themselves as well as others) and raises the vitriol of discourse. As cartoonist Randall Munroe recently put it in xkcd, "It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people."
Facebook, for all its flaws, presents a good way around this because it’s set up to closely track your real-life interactions, as closely as you want it to. It's not perfect, of course. Last year, I joined a real-life Scrabble group and, as a result, made a lot of friends. But the explosion of Facebook's Scrabulous program rendered the old-fashioned habit of meeting for drinks and board games obsolete and oddly cumbersome. I'm now annoyed when random strangers challenge me to Scrabulous games. "I'm not your friend," I think. For me, the playing was secondary to the social aspect.
Last.FM has likewise developed a brilliant way of organizing music fans. By obsessively tracking your listening habits and comparing it to those of others, it finds "neighbors" in music taste within its network. I've found that these fictional "neighbors in taste" point me indirectly to more enjoyable music than my real friends would. But for me, nothing beats hearing something bizarre from my roommate's room, poking my head round the door and yelling, "Hey, this is great, who is this?"
So the game-plan? Superimposition. Rather than becoming immersed in World-of-Warcraft style parallel worlds, let's work to develop networks that will supplement, rather than replace our intricate sidewalk life. Creative networks like Last.fm and Facebook are helping to build the blueprint, amalgamating our real-world friends with those short-circuit friends the Internet unavoidably throws your way. But it's up to us to build the Web 3.0 which will ensure that, in fulfilling the possibilities of social networking, we don't leave behind our trusted and reliable physical connections.
