"Coming from the Welsh border, a village in the Black Mountains, Raymond Williams found that the images of rural life taught at Cambridge did not match what he had seen. As an academic at Cambridge, he studied and examined the contradiction, along with the contrasting idea of the city, which in the U.K. has never been separate from the countryside. Rural life without cities had existed in other parts of the world, but not for a very long time in Britain."

"“Wellman is finding that Twitter isn’t flat,” Vidantam says—as if Tom Friedman’s chimerical “flatness” (the analytic value of which has proven to be nil) is the only possible quality of transformative political agency.

In last year’s revolutions, it wasn’t flatness that gave social media its power. It was its hyperlocality, its novel blending of intimate communities and witness at a distance.

Other work in which Wellman is involved argues for the richness of real-world community life that gets instantiated in Twitter. In a paper called “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” Wellman & his coauthors find that Twitter networks are “the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. There they conclude that “studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.”

Here’s the thing: Twitter is part of the “real world.”"

"In this European study, "93% and 86% of people say their personal and business circles have grown, respectively, and 76% say they're more productive. More importantly, 88% said their isolation has decreased, which probably influences their productivity (and happiness)."