Be Part of Where You Live
What concerns me is how our information networks have enabled us to become hyper-connected to geographically distant communities, while at the same time disconnected from our local ones. Virtual and long-distance relationships can enrich our lives in myriad ways, but I fear that our reliance on them has the potential to erode our physical communities and diminish our sense of place.
Wendell Berry once said that “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” Knowing where you are requires being fully present in your place, and you can’t do that when you’re glued to your Twitter feed 24/7 or jetting around in search of face time with connections outside your local community. People who live in a place without inhabiting it are like vacant houses in a neighborhood. (And if they travel enough, their only presence in their community is their vacant house.)
Notes:
Folksonomies: social media locality local
Taxonomies:
/technology and computing/hardware/computer networking/router (0.480955)
/real estate/apartments (0.396854)
/real estate/low income housing (0.367328)
Keywords:
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Entities:
Wendell Berry:Person (0.989501 (neutral:0.000000)), Twitter:Company (0.768780 (neutral:0.000000))
Concepts:
Community (0.933051): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Neighbourhood (0.886389): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Time (0.805792): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Localism (0.783951): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Social sciences (0.737232): dbpedia | opencyc
Wes Jackson (0.686094): dbpedia | freebase | yago
You Don’t Live in the Twitterverse: a Plea to Ground Yourself in Place
