The global village. No amount of aggregated collective action of itself constitutes community. That's John Dewey in the mid-twenties, in the middle of a different and yet not so different sort of technological revolution. The link between the optimistic confidence then and now doesn't take much of a mental click to make. Now, here's me, just the other day, calming a friend who's new to one of my own favorite online hang outs.
People come and go.
Someone flames somebody else, and either both get over it, or both disappear, or an all out flame war flares up. An absolute waste of a valuable resource. It's a fascinating ant farm. Looking more objectively now at these words I rattled off in a personal note, typing before I thought, and then looking at the Dewey quote, I'm overwhelmed by the echoing rings of micro and macrocosms. Somehow, it slipped out that a single conference, be it on a BBS, Usenet, the Web, wherever, is a community within the framework of another.