This link sent to me by a friend, investigates the sometimes disturbing relationship between our  real life identity and the personas we maintain with the various groups we interact with versus the alter ego’s we might have on the net – social networking, personal hobbies and obsessions conflict and can become mixed up in a different way, it reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s classic 1965 article “The City is not a  tree” which sets out how the idea that our “community” is no longer bound by a specific location as in a medieval village but is much more  widely and variously distributed in relationships, time and space , an idea, which although contested, still explains a primary problem with much of modernist and even current city planning which mistakenly tries to create location based communities of proximity, when all of us have cell phones and Facebook, family  far away we talk to on Skype and friends and business all over the globe… Google’s interest in this is probably far from  benign and it is very interesting to see the types of research they are engaged in.

Alexander’s CIty is not Tree as a PDF