"In January 1998 a massive ice storm descended on New York, New England, and eastern Canada. It crushed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, forcing thousands of people into public shelters and leaving millions of others in their homes without electricity. In this book Stephen Doheny Farina presents an insider's account of these events, describing the destruction of the electric network in his own village and the emergence of the face-to-face interactions that took its place.

His stories examine the impact of electronic communications on community, illuminating the relation between electronic and human connections and between networks and neighborhoods, and exploring why and how media portrayals of disasters can distort authentic experience."--BOOK JACKET.