The first is this: How do you explain the palpable popularity of social media? Could it be that in a liquid modern world of short- term relationships, commitments ‘until further notice’ and high levels of mobility and speed, social media fill (however inadequately) a gap? Old face-to-face communities of the village where everyone knows everyone else are the stuff of romanticized historical novels or, for some, claustrophobic memory. But the desire to find friends, however friable, or at least to make some human connections, is still strong and perhaps even prompted by some felt losses of ‘community’.