Apparently at least one faculty member at MIT has been off the 'net entirely for the past twenty years. This story discusses Professor Keith Hampton's iNeighbor network.
Distributed by the New York Times New Service, apparently both MIT and the Times failed to do even a single Google search for "community network," which would have shown that there is not only a well-established national organization focused on online communities of place (the Association For Community Networking), but also hundreds of thriving local community network projects, some of them more than a decade old.
The article has the look and feel of a press release; apparently the Times no longer bothers to do any research or get second opinions. It's almost laughable in parts, especially where someone describes in glowing terms how they found a tennis partner online. This is news? Community networks have been supporting local social networking since the eighties.