gecyberschaft
n.— «Mary Ann Allison of the Allison Group coined “gecyberschaft.” Here’s her idea: sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies described village society before the Industrial Revolution (gemeinschaft) and urban society afterwards (gesellschaft).…So if your unit of community in gemeinschaft was the village, it became “friends and family” in gesellschaft, and it’s now your “primary attention group.” You pay attention to that group (or groups, I’d hope she’d say) and to “groups of purpose”—groups neither bound to a place nor to a particular bureaucracy. In gemeinschaft, your status was ascribed (based on birth); in gesellschaft, it was achieved; and now, in gecyberschaft, it’s assessed. » —“Gecybercshaft” by Susan Crawford Susan Crawford blog (New York City) Jan. 5, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Sean in Oneonta, New York, says that when he was growing up in New Jersey, his family would pile in the car and set off on a surprise adventure, whether a short distance or long, and the kids would be told only that they were going on Buxtehude...