It is wonderful to live in a friendly neighbourhood surrounded by beauty and people who are pleasant and do not invade one's privacy, so unusual to have the right combination! But that's really the bubble world....not quite the world we live in! A neighbourhood is as friendly as we are. Neighbourhoods are a localized community where face-to-face social interactions occur, the personal settings and situations where residents seek to realize common values, socialize youth and maintain effective social control. Social interactions among people living near each other is what a neighbourhood is.
In the early eighties at the start of my married life, we lived in a very friendly neighbourhood, where everyone knew each other because they all worked in the same company. There were joint shopping trips and family picnics and celebrations of holidays and national events and sports events and birthdays and newborn babies and marriages and deaths and so many social events. We were quite happy meeting the same people all the time and being friends with next door neighbours, watching our children growing up together. This was the tail end of the twentieth century.
Come the twenty first century and a friendly neighbourhood is found on Facebook or Twitter and a host of other social networking sites. You can live next door to each other and not see each other for months on end and many times you don't know the names of the people you're living next to! Social interaction is no longer face to face but FB to FB or via Skype or Google Talk or something like that! One must move with the times, though it takes some adjustment mentally, emotionally and socially!
The other day I read this in a neighbourhood social networking site: Our neighborhood social networking system is based on the latest Web 2.0 technology. We offer most of the interactive features you find on popular social networking websites. Our platform enables us to instantly create neighborhood websites with features such as news, announcements, comments, forums, calendars, member pages, polling, private messaging - with many new features development. So face to face has been replaced by interactive; being involved with one another's lives next door to each other has been replaced by news, announcements, comments, forums etc. I need to adjust my thinking....this is the world of virtual reality where you can create instant neighbourhoods!
This clip on YouTube is an introduction to social networking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myyJLK1PRFI&feature=related
