The whole social networking phenomena is fascinating to me. I mean if we think back to 200 years ago, social interaction was predominately within the realm of the village, with some communication with surrounding villages for events such as festivals, for trade and for marriage.

Today however we live in what I like to think about as “distributed communities” whereby our social networks take the form much more of spiderweb or the connections between they eyes on a potato (rhizomes if you like) and where one has a friend here, and a friend there, rather than having ones friends only in ones immediate neighbourhood. One of my students used to come in to Tokyo each day from the Japan sea coast on the bullet train (about 2 hours each way). That is an extreme example, but if one draws a map of ones friends, one finds that is looks much like a three dimensional spiders web (some people in New Zealand, some in Australia, some in Japan, some in Turkey, some in China, some in Quebec etc.).

These distributed communities supersede the idea of the nationstate in many ways. So the way in which these social networks encourage the development of communities is, I think, worthy of investigation. Of course language still remains a barrier, but our world is that much smaller as a result of such technology.

elliot: hat tip! asoboo.com is a very nice looking site.