Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

I do not have the time, as I have chosen to live my life, fully to acknowledge everyone on the bus, nor to offer my presence fully to them. Nor do I want to be arrested. I pull in, and I hope that they pull in, and we move among the strangers and accomplish what we call work.

Though it could be argued that telephone contact or—even “better”—visually accompanied voice communications reduce the artificiality of electronic mediation, I would stop short of hailing the potential of these technologies as the “new communities.” Even the finest quality virtual presence which will ever be invented—and amazing developments in this field are sure to arise—can never achieve the intimacy and historical reality of face-to-face, body-to-body human contact. Human beings emerged in and have evolved in the physical world wherein we encountered other humans, animals, plants, water, air, the land, in an environment of space, time, sounds and light, subtle and elaborate exchanges with other humans, vibrant and bristling atoms. This is our earthly existence. This is our life and the physical world our home. We are foolish to believe we can give up solidity, flesh, and human encounter. We are foolish to want to.

I bring us back to eastern Pennsylvania and the town of Roseto. During the 1960s and 1970s, the culture of the town was transformed by the automobile, television, and the new normality. The traditions of three-generation families, life-long maintenance in one community, the retention of off-spring in their hometowns, the bonds of religious and club affiliations, all of these broke down as the town belatedly “joined the twentieth century.” Roseto became as loosely connected a “community” as were the neighboring towns, as are most towns. The enchantment gone, Roseto’s public health statistics took on the familiar look of the rest of the United States: coronary heart disease, cancer, and infectious disease all rose to match rates in the rest of the nation.¹³

What we are losing is what has researchers in various fields (medicine and political science in particular) have come to call “social capital.” The concept was first formulated by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) during the 1970s as a parallel to economic and cultural capital resources.¹⁴