How can we make the internet more useful for the enjoyment and enhancement of real life?

There aren’t very many beautiful places left in the world, and the places in which most of us live are some of the ugliest of all those remaining. We are isolated from like-minded people, holed into environments completely devoid of architectural definition and visible community activity.

Many of us turn to the internet to escape and rectify these problems in our lives. We can find any number of people who share our interests and build a community with them. But these communities are in the end doomed to failure by their anonymity and placelessness. We need faces with which to talk to one another, and places in which to live together. How can we use the internet to help create these places?

It seems the internet has two main advantages over physical communities in that online communities are made of information, so information about the community is very easy to obtain, organize and transmit, and therefore very easy to change. Secondly, it is very inexpensive to create an online community, whereas it takes many years and millions, if not billions of dollars to create a successful physical community. Most of the successful physical communities (and there are very few) are many hundreds or even thousands of years old.

What do you think of this analysis, and how do you think web development can help alleviate the problems underlying such an opinion, whether you agree with this opinion or not?