I agree with you, Ernie. It seems like there're two components of community, the first more important than the second. The first is the desire to commune/fellowship (the decision to engage, as you put it) and the second is the place where that communing occurs. Look at Catacombs for a good example; we all did everything together, including the guys that moved off the hall eventually. That community was
established on Catacombs(and more broadly, at Covenant) but it's expanded beyond those physical locations to be a more flexible entity.

I feel like the like a columnist for World that free-lances for Wall Street Journal with all my comments in this discussion. Mesh I wholeheartedly agree with you that the advent of national retail chains and all the consumptive undercurrents this trend signifies are in fact what probably helped to destroy the traditional modes of community in America.
However I would suggest that the old forms of community were guided by an earlier set of economic conditions. Let me be clear, I am not an economic determinist. Rather, I think that economic factors provide limits on the places community can form. The centralized town, has economic factors that enabled it, namely, the railroad. The small, centralized towns were only possible because it was relatively cheap to ship things inland through rail freight. At the railway town products go in, and others go out.
My point is that technological reality and economic reality have a lot to do with how community can come about. Hopefully, we live in the twilight year of mass retail. But in any case, community has to take place in the context of the commercial world, it doesn' really have another option.
One of the benefits of an information economy, is that things are becoming more decentralized, more jobs rely only on the computer, and not on a certain place of work. If I'm correct, I see a change that will allow people to reform communities in whatever mode they like, including whomever they wish. See my newest blog post for more.

Matt, I hope my blog is closer to the WSJ. What you say makes sense to me, and I think Josiah's SIP suggested at least one way that a new info-economy can coincide with new technology in a positive way.

My mom sent me an e-mail responding to this post, which is chock-full of practical thoughts:

"For my personal take....Wal Mart has in fact become part of the community here. I know some who work there. Because of my personality, I say hello to some (not all) of the greeters on a frequent basis. Because we live in a small town, I almost always see another shopper whom I know. Many of us who home school stop and have 'a small group meeting' right there. It's funny.

You are also correct about it pushing out small businesses. Many of us talked about what would happen to downtown not so much when Wal Mart came but when the mall was built. It has changed some. Edwin not only moved to the mall but he went out of business last year. I would stop and talk to him every once in a while but I was always in a hurry and I rarely went in his store at the mall. I don't need to buy toys much anymore so I avoided the social aspect. When he was downtown however, I went in, shopped, talked and moved on. At the mall I just moved on."