Agreed. In fact, some of the best social organizations are the ones forced on us by random chance... neighborhoods are like this. Any social group based on a

Agreed. In fact, some of the best social organizations are the ones forced on us by random chance... neighborhoods are like this. Any social group based on a common interest (including board games) won't be a cross section of any culture, simply because it selects from a subset of people in that culture. The default in most neighborhoods now is to not know your neighbors, everyone meets new people to talk with online, and that takes care of that impulse. I've often thought it would be good to develop some sort of geographically based system of community for the Internet, where everyone is included in communities and sub-communities based on their physical location. So, a group of people formed by you and the people whose houses border your own, another group overlapping with that one for your neighbor's house and the ones that border it, a bigger group for the block and surrounding blocks, a bigger one for your part of the city, etc. Edit: Forgot to explain... you'd chat, post pictures, etc social media style within the groups, and you'd be able to direct your visibility by choosing how you chat. Kind of like being in an MMORPG game, where you can use one kind of chat to talk to your group, another for your guild, another for the zone you're in, and another for the whole world. Each person could publish anything that interested them, from pictures to links to information, and send invites to people in the local area for events or discussions. The hard part is that people have to be automatically attached to these communities - there are a lot of people who won't care enough to opt in, there are still a lot of people who don't have internet access, there has to be policing and moderation. It'd be necessary to work out in detail and law how to avoid its abuse, but that's true of most technology.