I usually agree with Richard Florida's perspective on urban issues, but not here, where he argues that technology (particularly the Internet) tends to curb our interaction with our own neighborhoods and cities:
If I'm writing this blog (something I love to do), I'm not mixing and mingling on the street, if I order my groceries from an on-line store, I'm less likely to go to the store. All of these things lessen and limit human interaction. Of course, they increase the efficient allocation of time. But they also limit real, human contact, and the chance of random happenstance interactions. Heck, my GPS makes it less likely I'll ask for directions; my on-line catalogue and reviews give me little need to ask a shop-owner for advice. Technology makes me more house-bound (something I sort of like) and yes more efficient at work. I can go to the office less, the store less. I can "work" more, interacting with people and commerice on-line. My main source of human energy are my walks in the ravine. As beautiful as it is, it's certainly not Hudson Street. The internet and the social media, for all the great things they bring, damp down human interaction and certainly limit the chances of random connections. I'm a big fan of all this, don't get me wrong, but I think the effects on places, cities and communities cut several ways.
Face-to-face communication may be richer, but interaction online is still human interaction no matter how one defines it. The alternative to interaction online is frequently not face-to-face interaction, but none at all. For example, I'm interested in land-use issues, but my wife just rolls her eyes whenever I bring them up; if I put the TV on the City Council channel, she'll just get up and leave the room. My two-year-old cares about urban issues only when they involve trains. My co-workers, at least the ones I see regularly, don't care either. Without blogs, I wouldn't talk to anyone about this stuff; I would be interacting a lot less than I am. (And how much more random could the connections you make online be?)
Plus, it's not like I spent my time before blogs hanging over the fence gossiping with neighbors. The time I spend online is mostly time I used to spend watching TV or reading. I go out about as often as before, I just spend my time inside differently.
But even if the Internet reduces "place-based" interaction, is that necessarily a bad thing? Don't get me wrong: face-to-face communication is valuable, and most people crave it to one degree or another. But there's also a lot of drudgery in having to interact with people just because they're at hand. One of the good things about growing up was getting more control over whom I had to interact with. I had no freedom at all when I was in elementary school. Whom I walked to school or shared classes with was dictated by place -- whomever happened to live nearby -- rather than congeniality. Things were a bit better in junior high and high school when I got a little say over class scheduling and extra-curricular activities, and thus some control over whom I associated with. Things got even better in college and, for me, better yet in law school and work.
Online interaction is just an extension and intensification of this happy trend. I interact with people who share my interests, if not my opinions. I "bump" into strangers who have interesting points of view. I'm exposed to things that I never knew existed. If that means one fewer conversation about the weather now and then, that's fine with me.
Update: Richard Florida's rebuttal.
