Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet - douglasadams.com

I read the quote above, from the inimitable Mr Adams, a few days back and was struck by the apparent simplicity of the idea it expressed. As I sit here in a darkened room flicking repeatedly back and forth between blog pages, forums, flickr, Twitter, Facebook and others, I am busy recreating connections somehow lost in the real world. Moving back and forth between Saudi and the UK, I now carry my social world with me, never again do I truly need to be apart from my 'friends'. No surprise then that the absence of some or other contact from the virtual world, leads to a sense of 'missing' them and wondering what they are up to. I feel more detached if I don't have internet access than I do when I'm away from friends and family.

I've no idea whether this has any basis in fact but, it seems to me, that those parts of the world that are the least likely to have an internet connection, are the most likely to live in villages, and vice versa. They strive to join the 'haves', whilst we strive to recreate a pastiche of the community we left, only constructed of bits and bytes. I'm sure the social anthropologists will have field day with this sort of stuff in years to come. In the meantime, I will keep trying to keep up with what's going on within my own personal mouse-driven sphere of interest for another evening.