What do you know? I was waiting for my fellow lunchers to arrive today and saw Rob's post about how satellite radio is not going anywhere and he made me think of the following which goes someway to describe my periodic rant that the bloggy world is not really so new but it may still be better. Attack me please.

I find myself next to you but not quite with you on these observations but this may be a matter of my understanding. So here goes.

I do think the "One to Many" is a poor model and is actually a model that never really was. When we look back from the digital era we tend to forget there were aspects to community that existed (and often exist still) strongly but do not get adding into either the new or old formula. So while it may have been the dream of marketers in the model of "One to Many" that everyone shopped at the mall and wore Levis, people also baked breads and squares, made jams and even sewed their own clothes and quilted. Like an immigrant family with another language, non-majoritarian skills were not discussed in public space so they are not taken into account.

But these personal skills or traditions, for me, are the things that actual have always bound together real communities. They are not, however, homogenous or scalable. They create natural communities based on local unique resources and skills in response to those resources. They also discussed the local resources and community to no end but did so orally and on paper. In that way people always have lived in niche interest groupings but they were largely defined by family and village.

It may be a quibble, then, but what I see is more the "Some to Some" (rather than "Many to Many") as re-establishing itself, a new village without contiguous streets, perhaps in a way family without blood-ties. This new form of locality will take into account and express the hub around which individuals gather and identify themselves - and not just as tangential or a third space to escape to but more essential than that. People need to believe in someing and gather around hubs in common belief. And while, different digital or otherwise defined new hubs may or may not accept overlap with others and individuals may or may not be free or interested in choosing to be associated with more than one hub, people are and always have been drawn to these sorts of hubs of commonality.

But hubs can only be so large and with so many characteristics. We cannot handle the cacophony of the possibilities and information that is now immediately at hand. We have to sift. For me "Many to Many" is the cacophany but "Some to Some" is what is left after sifting and selection - a comprehesibile grouping of some sort that makes the experience livable.

The result of all that is that I agree that the satellite radio - as a "One to Many" model - does not speak to that need. But somehow sports talk radio does. Bob Dylan and his radio show may be all well and fine but I am not going to define myself around his output in the way that I am the Red Sox. There is a geniality and a responsiveness in the latter that is not in the former. We need to read the psalms together responsively from time to time and by doing so we know where we belong.