RSA: Community and the death of the English Village
*Q1: Hasn’t the outsider always been incredibly successful? They don’t want to integrate. How should they be able to live in your ideal?
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CA: it is now possible to be in neighbourhood as an outsider. It wasn’t for most of history – you were the witch. But people who have down well have less of a sense of local responsibility that they did in the squireachical age. Public space is hugely important because it is where people meet.
Q2: choice versus compulsion: choosing who you associate with, rather than having that chosen by location
(no discussion of this)
Q3: do we lose something by abandoning geographic community with it’s accountability and responsibility.
CA: That local community just doesn’t exist. We don’t have the chance to develop that.
MT: But is there something more important about local?
CA: it is qualitatively different, and I wouldn’t want to see it abandoned. But we can’t engineer it from outside.
Q4: live in a village, but spend my weeks in London. The larger a human community gets, everything scales, good and bad, culture and crime.
CA: the Internet gives us both.
*Q5: that nomadic group of 150 is just a moving village.
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MT: Lambeth has 50% turnover – how do you build community amongst that?
*Q6: Psychological roots of groups?
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HH: 12 is very important. Effective groups. Evolution: those who hung out in groups survived, those who struck out on their own didn’t. A book group that went from 12 to 20 stopped working. Scale is important.
CA: anti-nomad, spent a lot of time travelling around a regret it. The Internet allows us to find communities of interest that re non-locks, but people are happier when decisions are taken locally.
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Some Good Reading About The Future of News Paid Members Public
Good stuff I’ve read recently, haven’t linked to yet, but don’t have much to add to right now: * The Nichepaper Manifesto [http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/07/the_nichepaper_manifesto.html] – an articulate and well argued guide to how niche publishing might looks going forwards. * Media