In the 1980s, Cheers was the Boston neighbourhood bar “where everyone knows your name”. Forty years later an unlikely combination of pandemic and tech is recreating the sense of community that TV series celebrated, suggests Maryam Banikarim, Head of Marketing at Nextdoor, the online neighbourhood network.
With people isolated in their own homes for long periods over the past year, “disconnection has become a more real thing”, she observed to a virtual DMEXCO audience (September 2021), but an antidote is readily available in the localism that has come in the pandemic’s wake.
People are connecting locally
“This need to actually...