social proximity
In the preface to his book The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City 1830-1875, Kenneth Scherzer (1992) described how the neighborhood of nostalgia has become a culturally powerful image as communities are lost to decay, rezoning or bulldozing. He explains “the sentiment grows everywhere we turn, the fabric of community life seems threatened. Filmmakers have rediscovered and now even celebrate ‘the mean streets’ of New York as if they could disappear any moment” (p. 2). Scherzer explained the neighborhood of nostalgia ignores historical evidence that, due to the fast pace of residential changes, the community function of the neighborhood had become weak. He suggested that New Yorkers relied upon “the unbounded community,” a group of friends and social connections extending throughout the city, not necessarily tied in one geographic part of New York. The point is that community does not always grow from simply being in the same place as other people. Just because people have physical proximity to one another does not necessarily mean they will share social proximity. Minglang Zhou (2002) defined social proximity in her essay “Between US and THEM in Chinese: Use of lai (come) and qu (go) in the Construction of Social Identities” as inclusiveness, “such as cooperativeness, solidarity and intimacy” (p. 54). Zhou’s research, based on a linguistic study comparing American and Chinese choice in verbs used to construct social identities, suggests that relationships in social spaces are patterned after relationships in physical spaces but not necessarily rooted in physical spaces.
I moved frequently throughout my childhood in and out of neighborhoods. I walked behind neighbors’ houses to visit friends who lived blocks over from me. I rode my bicycle with the boys across the street. I raced to the honeysuckle vines with kids from my block. I shared physical proximity with these people, but often little else. I never quite belonged in their social groups, sometimes because of their age, other times because I didn’t like the same things they did. I liked to read and listen to music and my closest friends throughout my youth were also readers, dreamers like me. So while my neighbors might have been geographically near to me, those I considered my friends had similar interests. Furthermore, I am currently only familiar with three of my neighbors in my apartment building. The girl downstairs has an Irish wolfhound. I say hello as we pass in the parking lot. Across the hall lives an African man with whom I exchange pleasantries when I see him. He occasionally and mistakenly receives packages addressed to me. The couple upstairs has a Boston terrier; I see them on walks to the mailbox. I wouldn’t say that I know any of these people well. I suppose one could argue that these shallow connections are part of the nature of apartment living, particularly in a building filled mostly with graduate students leading busy, separate lives. It could, however, point to larger societal changes.
James A. Vela-McConnell explored social proximity in his book Who Is My Neighbor?: Social Affinity in a Modern World. McConnell (1999) pointed out that while research has shown the importance of physical proximity in the early development of friendships, “it is later superseded by similarities in beliefs and values” (p. 31). He explained, “choosing to have relationships with those who are similar to ourselves validates our sense of our own identities” (p. 31). With today’s digital possibilities, society is not limited to geographic proximity for social connection or participation. In lieu of proximity, we rely on technology to help us construct our collective identities by trying to recreate connections to geophysical locations. Social media sites work as an “unbounded community,” in which your geographic location is only one way to connect with other social media users. However, getting people to connect through their attachment to, and affinity for, a geographic location is one of the ways that sites like yelp, outside.in and EveryBlock encourage participation. These sites provide geophysical neighborhoods with a web presence. Neighborhood becomes not a metaphorical representation of the geophysical location but rather a digital representation.
June