More about rootedness: Why one cannot become rooted in a digital society. If you haven't read this, it might help to pick up where I'm about to start. Part of this is an elaboration on the importance of the environmental social construction. Most of my ideas on this come from Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh (1999).

A naturalized understanding of the environmental conditions is imperative in a rooted experience of the self as part of a social structure. Without participating in that environment or having an environment at all (as in the case of a digital community) rootedness is impossible. Linguistic expressions that manifest when one deals with a society are specific to that society's understanding of itself as part of the larger world.

In the book The Sacred Canopy by Peter Berger (1967) the origin, construction, and maintenance of a culture; how they operate and why they're all vital to the human experience of society are detailed.

An environmental experience of the divine is a prerequisite because that's such a basic human experience, and the most powerful justification for human action. Next comes the structuring of that space along the human experience of it: Mythologies that relate to the animals, landmarks, and stars must all be in place for the society to explain why they live there instead of somewhere else. Finally, generations of people add to and reinforce that mythos, and all of this is based on an environmental foundation. And has everything to do with one's sense of rootedness.

Without having that experience of "the place," only a shallow and indefinite temporal connection can be made between the self and the location. When I say that despite an etymological reference to a web site as a location it has only half of the requisite social capacity to root an individual, it is because of this lack of environment.

The other argument I want to put forward is also related to environment, but instead of the location as a reifier for identity, it's about the location as a linguistic metaphor, which transforms over time into the way a society understands itself; about how a society develops an identity beyond simply, "We are people of the desert, they are people of the forest."

Cognitive science has brought some empirical evidence to the table that language has foundations in how we operate in the world: How our five senses interpret our surroundings and then how we are able to transform those experiences into metaphor upon which all abstract reasoning is based. Those base experiences, discovered when we're small and in a crib, when we're racing bicycles down the street, when we're on our first date, when we have our first heart-break, etc. all are conceived of as first metaphors that directly account for our experience of the world. Some examples from Philosophy in the Flesh on spatial metaphorical structures are:

• States Are Locations (interiors of bounded regions in space)
• Purposes are Destinations
• Means Are Paths (to destinations)
• Long-term, Purposeful Activities Are Journeys

Expanded examples of the first metaphorical structure, States are Locations, are:

• I'm in love
• He's on the edge of madness
• We're far from safety

Although I'm relying on English to convey these concepts, they're not necessarily all structured the same across different societies. In fact, many non-Westernized, non-Globo societies have very different metaphorical structures for explaining the same phenomenons. What I'm suggesting isn't that every culture has its own, singular linguistic construction simply because it exists in a physical location, but that in order to construct a society in which one can be rooted, this process must take place.

I think the idea that anyone could be rooted in a digital culture, in an online community, or in a transnational society is just not possible. Additionally, the deep personal satisfaction that comes from being a rooted part of a society is (for most) a very important part of their psychology.