Here in Willingdon Trees, Eastbourne, East Sussex the weather has changed dramatically over the last few days. We have gone from a heatwave through thunderstorms to cloudy and showery weather and temperatures quite a bit lower, more comfortable for work! In Hollington, Hastings, they had floods with 10 foot depth water when a small river overflowed near a culvert. I felt really sorry for those who were trying to clean up the mess when their homes were flooded.

For those of you who live in the Eastbourne area, there are a number of local issues for which I would like to know some answers. Does anyone know when the new Aldi in Hampden Park is due to open? When was it that the travellers camped in the car park near the Somerfield (soon to be Aldi) empty store? Has anyone looked at the possibility of using Brightkite as a way of keeping in touch with each other in our local community? On the last question, it appears that you can only post messages of 140 characters or less, like Twitter.

From a personal point of view, I quite like the instantaneous nature of Twitter and Friendfeed and have only discovered the usefulness of Facebook in the last few weeks, even though I opened my account on it quite a while ago. However, one of the reasons I am now writing this blog and several other postings is because I now feel the need for something of a somewhat less fragmentary nature.

I have lived in Willingdon Trees for nearly 10 years now, and one of the things that I notice is how little contact I have with other people in the neighbourhood. I talk to both my next door neighbours (I live in a detached house) but I don't know my neighbours next door but one on either sides. I live on the edge of the Willingdon Trees estate and have rarely entered into the estate itself during the last 10 years. I talk to the people I meet in the local convenience shop and I know a few other people through my work contacts. I wonder how many of you in your own local setting are in a similar situation? I believe that I may in a sense be experiencing the alienation of which Karl Marx spoke in his political theory.

This sense of semi-isolation is, I believe a result of us living so close geographically to one another and perhaps wanting to have our own sense of space (yes, I am signed up to MySpace as well!). There are various ways we can overcome this without being unbelievably extrovert or if you have a tendency to introversion like me. We can become members of local community clubs and groups which meet regularly, perhaps churches or choirs. I used to beinvolved in both of these mentioned activities, the problem was, yes, you guessed, they were not in my local community.

I know that what I should do is practise what I preach and join something in order to get out of my semi-isolation. However, being of a post-modern bent and bordering on becoming a middle-aged social media and technical geek, I have taken to using my broadband internet to get in touch. This is something that I previously thought I would never do, but in many ways I have come to see the tremendous potential of the internet as a means of communication. I tried using the internet first about 12 years ago and was totally underwhelmed by the number of websites available and the lack of useful which could be obtained. I gave up on it after several attempts and only came back to internet use less than a year ago. The transformation since the early days is unbelievable, information is freely accessible and so much is free to the user.

I am beginning to see that the internet can be used very effectively for keeping in touch with people a great distance away from each other, but I believe it is an ideal medium for communicating to one another in a more local setting. I hope that many of us will catch the vision

to put the possibilities into action.