Imagining the remainder as inert matter

Yamabuki by Sakai Hōitsu, late 18th-early 19th century

Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, is interviewed by a group of local elementary school kids.  They ask her a series of questions.

The first one was seemingly straightforward: "How long have you been part of this community?"

Actually, it wasn't straightforward at all. Even as I answered, "Two years," I was asking myself what it meant to be part of a community, versus just living somewhere. Sure, I had grown up in the Bay Area, and I felt that I was part of a community -- of Bay Area artists and writers, as well as people in other cities who I was connect to via social media -- but this community? What, if anything, had I contributed to the place where I now lived -- besides rent, and maybe the one article I had written for Sierra Magazine on the local night herons? (132)

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The student asks here the biggest challenge facing Oakland.  

Fumbling a little, I said something about how "different groups of people should talk to each other more."

The kid in front looked up from his clipboard, scrutinizing me. "So would you say. . . care?" he asked.

I suggested "communication," but days later, his clarification stayed with me. After all, communication requires us to care enough to make the effort.  I thought about how it's possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before), interested in the neighborhood only insofar as it allows one to maintain your exiting or ideal lifestyle and social ties. Like Buber's "I-It" relationship, a newcomer might only register other people and things in the neighborhood to the extent that they seem in some way useful, imagining the remainder as (at best) inert matter or (at worst) a nuisance or inefficiency.