For throughout a major part of human history (and prehistory), in most times and most places, men and women have lived out their lives not in great cities or urban sprawls, but in small and isolated worlds-in bands or tribes or villages or towns. However varied the human condition in these little worlds-and it varied enormously-they shared one crucial characteristic: the absence of anonymity. Their peoples were born and reared, they reached adulthood and married, propagated, grew old and died, surrounded always and almost exclusively by persons who knew them and who were known to them.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 39