There was a period when I had an in-person community where I could find similar things to what I now tend to find online – but that kind of thing is always very accidental, dependent on a situation very difficult to create intentionally. And there are certainly individual friends with whom I can have intense intellectual exchanges in person (although even those friendships, these days, tend to spill over into supplemental online interactions…).

So I’m not saying anything absolute about the privileging of a particular form of interaction – other than that I don’t share what is often a reflex assumption (which I’m not at all suggesting that you have) that online interactions are somehow less “real” than other forms of engagement: they are their own “real” thing and, like everything else that’s real, they are ambivalent and close certain things off even as they open other possibilities…

You comment reminds me – I’m already becoming anxious about a conference I’m about to go to, where I’ll be staying with a couple of colleagues. I don’t know that the folks who invited me to stay with them fully understand that I’m something like the world’s worst company, unless someone wants to talk about theory sort of all the time (or finds it particularly entertaining to watch me read… ;-P)… This sort of thing tends to get disguised in my everyday, as I usually have professional reasons to talk to people about the things I enjoy talking about anyway, and people don’t need to know that this is what I do all the time…

My best crowd has still always been online – both because it’s a self-selecting group, and because it’s easier for other people to tune me out if they get bored… ;-P