So, I have linked in a previous blog article, to a Wikipedia article, that car culture reduces people’s random social occurrences in public spaces, which was once an important way that people would get to know new people. So, how do people tend to get to know new people in the midst of car culture? So, now imagine this. In car culture, people typically travel from one boxed building to another, enclosed in their car in the spaces between, so social interaction on the road is largely off limits. So, you’d imagine that people would only socially interact when their in the box, at their destination. Or, in the case of marathons, sporting events, and the like, when they’re on the field, which is basically but a bigger box with void space in between the points.
So, let’s go about on an Internet search and see what we can find… yup, basically the results, though specifying in more detail, fits the abstract picture that I’ve painted. It’s all about the boxes.
Lifehacker, yes, that’s a good site, it had a pretty good article on the effects of ads on people.
Oh wait, one mention, walking groups. That one is not a box. Another one, the army. Not really a box in the same sense. You could argue that these are simply moving boxes. Ingress and Pokemon Go, those ones are interesting, not quite boxes there. Biking groups. Photography clubs share similarity to walking clubs.
20190725/DuckDuckGo what is the best way to get to know new people
20190725/https://lifehacker.com/the-best-places-to-meet-new-people-1512814587
20190725/https://lifehacker.com/why-its-so-hard-to-make-friends-after-college-and-wha-488975744
20190725/https://lifehacker.com/5953703/how-to-be-sociable-when-you-dont-feel-like-it
The question then, from a philosophical standpoint, is how do you eliminate the social void space between the boxes. For one thing, there are old solutions to this, like urban walkable communities that were out and about before car culture could be a thing.
But, overall, you have it. Most of what people are saying and putting down, they’re “boxes.” Once you get to the box, it all happens in there, so to speak. Lots of meetups and clubs, that’s for sure.
What about online meetups? That, similarly, is a box, albeit a much smaller one, contained within a fraction of the volume of some computer server. Then there is tons of routing and switching equipment to rendezvous the communication messages. A box, but with some very long skinny dendrites that reach out to the points to connect them together.