Yet we do more than ever. Plazas in city centers were converted to parking lots. And the streets became mere functional swaths of ever-widening asphalt surrendered to unceasing swarms of speeding vehicles. The Cold War wasn't just fought between the US and the USSR, it was fought here at home. Now people are trying to reconnect and reach out to each other via email and chat rooms, but it doesn't fill the void.
Humans crave human contact.
It's well documented in the textbooks of child development that babies and children that are denied the loving contact of parents grow up with more social problems and learning disabilities. The same holds true on the macro scale at the city and societal level. A society that lacks real contact and mingling of people withers. Democracy is not an institution that can survive or function properly in a vacuum. When left to blow in the breeze by an apathetic populace and controlled by the corporate and private interests that swoop in to ensure steady rates of return, eliminate dissidence and unpredictability, and control the flow of information, democracry dries up and taken out of the hands of the community.