62 JOSHUA MEYROWITZ
Shifting Connections and Disconnections vpically, analyses of live or mediated communities focus on closeness and connections.I would like to suggest that a more inclusive perspective also involves looking at changing patterns of distance and disconnection. Communities are defined by their boundaries. And with every change in boundaries comes a new form of indusion and exclusion, a new pattern of sharing and lack of sharing of experience. Some analysts of societal change have argued that the rise of modern urban centers following the Industrial Revolution created the new experience of a “world of strangers” (Sack 1988). This view certainly captures one explicit experiential component of the shift from rural agricultural communities to industrial cities, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. But this view also incorrectly suggests that “strangers” had no role in the structure of traditional societies. Further, it suggests that there was a one-time shift to a world of strangers rather than a more complex series of changes in the role of strangers. In place of the dichotomy of traditional society versus modem world of strangers, I offer a trichotomy. I suggest that we are now living in the third major phase in conceptions of “strangers” and “familiars,” a third manifestation of the balance of “them” versus “US.” I argue that traditional, modem, and postmodern societies each could be referred to accurately as a “world of strangers,” but the relative place, definition, and experience of strangers is different in each. Each of the three phases-traditional, modem, and postmodern-is linked in many important ways to a dominant mode of communication: traditional to oral communication, modem to literate communication, and postmodern to electronic communication! Each evolution in communication forms has involved a shift in social boundaries and hence a shift in the relationship between self and others. Each shift in communication is accompanied by a shifting sense of place, by a change in our perception of what George Herbert Mead (1934) called the “generalized other,” those others who seem significant enough for us to imagine how they may be imagining us. Each shift also is accompanied by a new sense of what I have called the “generalized elsewhere” (Meyrowitz 1989), that general imagining of how our locales may be viewed from the outside. There is space here to sketch these three phases only in the broadest of strokes. I am not concerned here with giving definitive assessments of each of these phases. Rather, I wish to highlight the boundary issues worth exploring when looking at the changes in group identity that may occur with changes in forms of communication.