It’s an interesting thing that people can feel alone in the middle of a crowd. Though most of us are surrounded by mobs of people there isn’t any authenticity or quality in the contact that we have with most of those people – this can lead to feelings of isolation even in the middle of the thronging hordes.

The Internet held the promise, at one time, of addressing this but I wonder how well it’s lived up to the hype.

Blogging seems to encourage stratification and establishment of power/traffic brokers to which others must become supplicants – no community exists without traffic and few are able to garner traffic independently. This leads to a few occupying the commanding heights and the rest in obscurity – as usual. Social network sites like MySpace create communities of laughable quality around themselves. Social news sites encourage corporate gaming of the rating algorithms to drive profitable traffic to client sites and again, little quality.

The only online environments that seem to foster a sense of community are special interest forums. Are highly focused forums, serving increasingly narrow interests and communities, the future of the Internet and social interaction in general? I don’t see the other idioms currently in place on the Internet filling the gap, but I wonder if narrowly interested groups is a healthy state for our society? Are the Clubbs and Societies of the Enlightenment a precedent for this type of fine-grained interest-specific societal organization?