The
Persistence and Transformation of Community:
From Neighbourhood Groups to Social Networks
Report to the Law Commission of Canada
October
30, 2001
“Community” is a multi-meaning word that in
Western societies has traditionally been anchored in neighbourhood interactions
and enshrined as a code work for cohesion. There have been fears in every
generation that community has been "lost" and hopes that it has been
"saved". People look back nostalgically to bygone days when community
was supposedly more robust. Have communities withered, persisted
or been transformed in the transition from the premodern to the modern and
postmodern worlds.? Researchers have found thriving communities wherever they
have looked, although not always in neighbourhoods. People wonder about the
absence of what used to be, while new forms of community have slipped under
their radar scopes. A
central argument of this report is that community has become embedded in social
networks rather than groups. As part of this transformation, there has been a
movement of community relationships from easily observed public spaces to less‑accessible
private homes.
As
a result of the continuing scholarly, policy, and public fixation on
communities as neighbourhood solidarities, community studies have usually been
neighbourhood studies, and healthy communities have come to be viewed as
densely-knit, tightly-bounded groups. From
the early 1960s, the balance of analysis swung away from bewailing the
Industrial Revolution's purported loss of community to using ethnographic and
survey techniques to discover that neighbourhood communities often continued to
function.
By the
1970s, some scholars had realized that while some neighbourhoods remained vibrant,
the proliferation of widespread networks of cheap and efficient transportation
and communications had allowed contact to be maintained with greater ease and
over longer distances. This led to viewing
community "liberated" from neighbourhood-centric thinking:
functionally as networks of social relationships rather than spatially as
localities. Contemporary communities rarely are found only in neighbourhoods,
as long as one adopts a social definition of community and not a spatial one.
Since the 1970s, many studies have
documented the existence, scope and importance of personal community networks
in a variety of social systems around the world. There has been a change from
"door-to-door" to "place-to-place" community, with little interaction
with the intervening territory between places. The
increased velocity of transactions has fostered interactional density. The
large-scale metropolis is accessible and links to diverse social networks can
be maintained more readily. The increased speed of routine communication has
been more dramatic than the increased speed of transportation. This increase in
speed has made door-to-door communications residual, and made most
communications place-to-place or person-to-person. Except in situations of
ethnic or racial segregation, contemporary Western communities are usually
loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, ramifying networks of specialized ties. Rather
than being full members of one solidary neighbourhood or kinship group,
community has become "glocalized". Contemporary urbanites juggle
limited memberships in multiple, specialized, far-flung, interest-based network
communities as they
deal with shifting, amorphous networks of kin, neighbours, friends, workmates,
and organizational ties. Only a minority of network members are directly
connected with each another. Most friends and relatives live in different
neighbourhoods; many live in different metropolitan areas. At work, people
often work with distant others and not those sitting near them. People usually
obtain support, sociability, information and a sense of belonging from those
who do not live within the same neighbourhood.
It is often useful to treat "community" as a "personal
community". Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them,
each person has her own personal network. Household members keep separate
schedules, with family get-togethers on the decline. Their activities and
relationships are informal rather than organizationally structured. Many
community networks contain about half kin and half friends, neighbours and
workmates. In such networks people cannot depend on the goodwill or social
control of a cohesive community. Instead, they often must actively search, maintain
and mobilize their ramifying ties, one-by-one, to deal with their affairs. The
sparse and unbounded nature of multiple community networks afford people more
discretion in the milieus in which people can participate and with which they
can identify.
Although
the public community of earlier eras was largely a man's game, community has become
more asynchronous, domesticated and feminized. Men now spend more time at home
instead of at bars or cafes, while the high percentage of women engaged in paid
work outside their homes means that women spend less time at home. Communities
have moved inside, into private homes. People chat less with their neighbours,
and are less able to provide mutual aid, or exercise social control over them.
Women have become the pre-eminent suppliers of emotional support in community
networks as well as the major suppliers of domestic services to households.
The
proliferation of computer-supported social networks is facilitating the
development of “networked
individualism" as the basis for community: individualized
person‑to‑person interactions and specialized interactions. It is
the individual, and neither the household nor the group, that is the primary
unit of connectivity. The Internet is not destroying community
but is responding to, resonating with, and extending the types of community
that have already become prevalent in the developed Western world: for local
and distant ties, strong and weak ties, kin and friends.
Where high speed place-to-place
communication supports the dispersal and fragmentation of organizations and
community, high speed person-to-person communication supports the dispersal and
role-fragmentation of workgroups and households. Each person is a switchboard,
between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals rather
than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Individuals
switch rapidly between their social networks. Each person separately operates
his networks to obtain information, collaboration, orders, support, sociability,
and a sense of belonging.
I.
Defining Community 7
II. Nostalgia
for the Supposed Loss of Community 8
II. Looking
for Community in Neighbourhoods 9
I.
From Spatial to Social Boundaries 18
II. Community
as Social Network 20
III. Personal
Communities 21
A. The Personal Community Network Approach 21
B.
Personal Communities are Multiple, Partial, Heterogeneous
and Sparsely-Knit Social
Networks 24
C. Many
Specialized Communities are Based on Shared Interests 26
D. Personal
Communities Provide a Variety of Socially Supportive
Resources 27
E. Communities
Operate as Both Interpersonal Duets and Network
Ensembles 29
F. Communities
are in Flux 32
G. Communities
Have Become "Glocalized" 33
H. Communities
Have Become Domesticated and Feminized 40
A. Is the Internet Increasing Community? 46
B. Is the
Internet Decreasing Community? 47
C. Is the
Internet Transforming Community? 48
D. The
Internet Increases and Transforms Community 49
II .
Issues in the Impact of the Internet on Community 51
A.
Are Online Relationships Narrowly Specialized or Broadly Supportive? 51
B. In What
Ways are the Many Weak Ties on the Internet Useful? 52
C. Is There
Reciprocity and Attachment Online? 53
D. Are
Strong, Intimate Ties Possible Online? 55
E. Does the
Internet Increase Community Diversity? 57
F. The
Continuing Coexistence of Space with Cyberspace 59
III. The Rise of Networked Individualism as a
Basis for Community 62
A.
From Place-to-Place to Person-to-Person Communities 62
B. The
Lessened Role of the Household as a Basic Unit of Community 64
C.
Mobile-ization 65
D.
Specialized Roles and Communities 66
IV. Virtual
Communities 67
A.
Online-Only Communities 67
B.
How Does Virtual Community Affect "Real Life" Community? 70
C. The
Continuing Impact of Cyberspace on Community 71
Part Four: References 74
“Community” is a multi-meaning word, that in Western societies has traditionally been anchored in neighbourhood interactions. “Community” has been enshrined as a code work for cohesion, even though in cohesion within one community may lead to discord with others (Suttles 1968, 1972). Yet even in the Western world, scholars, pundits, politicians and the public define and use the term "community" in many ways, some of which are ambiguous or mutually contradictory. As far back as 1955, George Hillery noted ninety-four scholarly efforts to define community. Hillery noted that "the 94 definitions used in this analysis are not all of the definitions of the community" (1955, p. 112; see also Hillery 1963, 1872, 1984).
In
the decades since Hillery's review, the multiple usages of community he
identified all remain in use, while other usages based on social network
analysis and computer-mediated communication have developed. Although Hillery's
discussion is the most detailed, other definitional reviews include those by
McClenahan (1929, pp. 104-106), Hollingshead (1948), Wellman and Leighton
(1979), O'Brien and Roach (1984), Perry (1986), Heller (1989), Goldenberg and
Haines (1992), Butcher (1993), Shodhan
(1995) and Brint (2001). Taken
together, the consensus is that community has come to be defined in terms of:
1. Common locality, either in-person
or online
2. Interpersonal relationships of
sociability, support and information, either in-person or online.
3. Common values, norms and
interests, without necessarily interacting or being co-located.
Community
analysis' vision of a different past involves the "Community
Question," the longstanding debate about whether communities have
withered, persisted or been transformed in the transition from the premodern to
the modern and postmodern worlds (Wellman 1979, 1988, 1999a, 1999b). Remember
the British musical lament, "Fings ain't wot they used to be" (Bart
1960)? They probably never were. Contemporary urbanites perversely flatter
themselves by remarking how well they are coping with stressful modern times in
contrast to the easy life their ancestors led. They look back to bygone, supposedly
golden days when they are sure that their ancestors — thirty, one hundred,
three hundred years ago — led charmed lives, basking in the warmth of true
solidary community. Perhaps most people have always thought that communities
had fallen apart around them, with loneliness and alienation leading to a war
of all against all.
Yet
researchers have found thriving communities wherever they have looked, although
not always in neighbourhoods. In addition to misplaced nostalgia for the past
and exaggerated fears of the present, there is cognitive inertia. People wonder
about the absence of what used to be, while new forms of community have slipped
under their radar scopes. For example, a central argument of this report is that community has
become embedded in social networks rather than groups. As part of this
transformation, there has been a movement of community relationships from
easily observed public spaces to less‑accessible private homes. i.e.,
privatized community. If people are tucked away in their homes rather than
conversing in cafes, then they are also going online: chatting online one‑to‑one;
exchanging email in duets or small groups; or schmoozing, ranting, and organizing
in discussion groups such as “list serves” or “newsgroups”.
There is a need to understand what kinds of community flourish, what
communities do — and do not do — for people, and how communities operate in
different social systems. For example, the rapidly expanding Internet has been
a big hope for community creation, with more than half of Americans (56
percent) having Internet access by the end of 2000 (Kew, Wellman and Chen
2002). As the Internet has infiltrated contemporary life, analysts have had to
move from seeing it as an external world to seeing how it becomes integrated
into the complexity of everyday life. They wonder if the Internet increases,
decreases, or transforms community. Although the debate surrounding the
influence of the Internet on community has been ongoing, no clear pattern has
yet emerged.
Taking
their lead from Tönnies (1887) critique of industrialization, many
definitions of community explicitly or implicitly treat it as occurring within
rather small territorial limits, such as would be found in a rural village or a
distinct neighbourhood. As "community" usually is partially defined
by social interactions among a set of person who know each other, the composite
definition of a "neighbourhood community" is of a bounded
geographical area in which many of the residents know each other. This approach
has been the traditional one in the past, arising out of the pastoralist assumption
of happy rural villagers as being the paragon of community life, with urban
communities struggling vainly to approach this pastoral ideal.
Since
the 1960s social scientists have vigorously contested the onetime orthodoxy
about the nature of community and family life. By contrast to previous armchair
assertions of the loss of community, their modus operandi was empirical
research to document the existence of community. Searching for connectivity
rather than isolation, they laid the groundwork for a social network approach
to the study of community. The debate about the nature of community, the
“Community Question” (as Wellman 1979 termed it), evolved as community scholars
changed their ideas about what constituted community and where to find it.
Given its importance to human kind and accessibility to public discourse, it
is a safe guess that the Community Question in some form will remain open to
the end of time. Yet important transformations have taken place in scholarly
approaches to the question.
1.
The
new zeitgeist of community optimism born with the student and civil rights
movements (Fellman 1973; Gitlin 1987);
2.
A
turning away from armchair speculation to ethnographic and survey techniques
that demonstrated the persistence of communities whenever social scientists
bothered to actually look for them (Wellman and Leighton 1979; Wellman 1988);
3.
The
discovery by social scientists such as Charles Tilly (1979) that violent
political conflicts arose more out of the clash of connected communities of
shared interests than out of the cri de coeur of the disconnected and
alienated (Feagin 1973; Feagin and Hahn 1973).
4.
A new
view of the European past that emphasized the strength of community in the
transition from the pre‑modern to the modern world (Wrightson and Levine
1979; Kertzer and Hogan 1989; Sabean 1990).
5.
A new
emphasis on the importance of family, kinship and community relationships in history
(Hareven 1977, 2000; Laslett 1965, 1988).
6.
An
interest in communities defined by shared subcultures, rather than shared
locality (Fischer 1975).
Until the 1970s the debate was about whether such
communities had been "lost" or "saved" (to use Wellman’s
1979 language) since the Industrial Revolution (e.g., Nisbet 1962; Etzioni
1995; Bellah, et al. 1996; Wuthnow 1998; Putnam 2000). From the early 1960s,
the balance of the debate swung away from bewailing the loss of community to
discovering that neighbourhoods have continued to function. Community scholars
increasingly used ethnographic and survey techniques to show that community had
survived the major transformations of the Industrial Revolution. Both fieldwork
and survey research showed that neighbourhood and kinship relations continue
to be abundant and strong. Large institutions have neither smashed nor withered
communal relations. To the contrary: the larger and more inflexible the institutions,
the more people seem to depend on their informal ties to deal with them. A
variety of mutually-supportive research blossomed. The developing body of research
has shown that while communities may have changed in response to the pressures,
opportunities and constraints of large-scale forces, they have not withered
away. They buffer households against large-scale forces, provide mutual aid,
and serve as secure bases to engage with the outside world (see reviews in
Choldin 1985; Fischer 1976; Gordon 1978; Keller 1968; Smith 1979; Warren 1978).
In
all cases, neighbourhood ties remain important, but usually only as a minority
of relationships in personal networks. For example, although ties with
neighbours and workmates comprise only a minority of Torontonians’ active and
intimate ties, the easy accessibility of such local relationships means that
they comprise nearly half of all encounters with community members:
face-to-face, by telephone, and by the Internet (Wellman 1996). In the inner
streets of Chicago (Sampson, Morenoff and Earls 1999) and the orderly tracts of
the Netherlands (Zamir, Volker and Flap 2001), companionship, support and
social control by neighbours remains important.
Neighbourly
relations are especially important when poverty or disability leads people to
invest heavily in local relationships. Poor men, living mostly public lives on
the streets of Washington DC depend so much on either for help that their
social lives are built on intense relationships that frequently burn out
through overloading (Liebow 1967). In Santiago, Chile informal community ties
are the keys to daily survival in the impoverished barrios (Espinoza
1999). They provide food, shelter, short-term loans, job leads, and help in
dealing with organizations. In this situation, neighbours (who are often kin)
provide most everyday support (see also
Roberts 1973, 1978, 1991) Yet such neighbours are poor themselves. To get
sizable amounts of money or access to good jobs, the residents must rely on
their weaker ties to wealthier, better-situated relatives who live outside the
barrios.
This
transformation in thinking became the academic orthodoxy of the late 1960s and
the 1970s. Scholars, planners and some politicians and members of the public no
longer thought of cities as evil, permeated with Original Sin. Their Jacobsean
cum Rousseauesque celebrations of community had the lingering aroma of the
1960s, seeing urbanites as permeated with Original Good and happily
maintaining mutually supportive ties.
One way of engaging in such community is for
people to interact in semi-public spaces, in places like pubs or cafés
(Scorsese 1973; Oldenberg 1989). Such a view of community as a public activity
appears in many books and articles, including two well-known studies of
community, Street Corner Society (Whyte 1943) and The Urban Villagers
(Gans 1962). Each of these books describes life in predominantly Italian
neighbourhoods of Boston in which there is much interaction on the streets.
Some treatments of neighbourhood communities are based on interactions in people's homes, a situation more feasible in contemporary North America because the increased size of homes facilitates entertaining community members (Warren 1978; Michelson 1976). Thus in suburban Levittown, NJ (Gans 1967) and exurban southern Ontario (Clark 1966), analysts documented little community interaction in public spaces but a fair amount of in-home visiting among neighbours. “Indicators of an increase in private activity at the expense of public activity, especially in the United States, abound” (Lofland 1989, p. 92). At the same time, women's community which often had been private in the past has become more public.
As a result of the continuing scholarly,
policy, and public fixation on communities as neighbourhood solidarities, community
studies have usually been neighbourhood studies. It is principally the emphasis
on common locality, and to a lesser extent the emphasis on solidarity, that has
encouraged the identification of “community” with “neighbourhood”. Healthy
communities have come to be viewed as densely-knit, tightly-bounded groups
(Hillery 1955, 1984). There is empirical as well as ideological warrant for
this. Researchers have found that despite the traumatic changes of modernization,
locality still matters. People still neighbour, visit their relatives help each
other, and object to loud parties next door. Physical proximity continues to
affect the frequency with which people see one another and provide material aid
(Wellman 1996; Wellman and Potter 1999; Wellman and Frank 2001). Neighbourhoods
remain as refuges from outside pressures, sources of interpersonal aid in
dealing with large bureaucracies, and useful means of keeping streets safe
(Wellman, 1988; Lofland 1989; Sampson, Morenoff and Earls 1999).
These continuing experiences provide several reasons why the concept of “neighbourhood” at one time was almost synonymous with the concept of “community” and continues to resonate strongly with it today:
1. Some researchers continued the habit of looking for community ties only in local areas, reflecting community scholarship’s origins in studying neighbourhoods (Stein 1960).
2. A general preoccupation with identifying the conditions under which communal sentiments can be maintained. In so doing, analysts reflect a continuing worry about whether normative integration and consensus persist. The most recent manifestation of this concern has been Robert Putnam’s raising the alarm that Americans are now “bowling alone” (1995, 2000); they are much less involved in voluntary organized groups, be they bowling leagues, churches, the Lions Club or unions (see also Wuthnow 1998). In his Tocqueville-like analysis (e.g., 1835), Putnam argues that this lessened organizational participation means less civic involvement in promoting good government and less “social trust” in governments and fellow citizens (see also Clemens 2001; Uslaner 2000a; Rotberg 2001; Bennett 1998; Galston 1999).
3. Many urban scholars have seen the neighbourhood as the microcosm of the city, and the city as an aggregate of neighbourhoods.
4. Administrative officials have imposed their own definitions of neighbourhood boundaries upon urban maps in attempts to create bureaucratic units (Taub, et al. 1977; Michelson 1997).
5. The particular concerns of municipal policymakers (and urban geographers, anthropologists and sociologists) with spatial distributions of social phenomena (e.g., Schwirian and Mesch 1993) has tended to be translated into local area concerns.
6. Many policymakers have been preoccupied with the conditions under which social cohesion can be maintained in cities and societies. The neighbourhood has been widely seen and studied as an apparently obvious container of communal solidarity (Stein 1960).
7. People are not randomly spread throughout the city, but clump according to some social characteristics, such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, language use, and stage in the life course. This means that some social problems, such as juvenile delinquency and illness, vary greatly by local area, thereby raising the salience of locality to public officials, the media, and the people who do or do not live there.
The concentration on the neighbourhood has had a strong impact on definitions of, research into, and theorizing about, community. Neighbourhood studies have produced finely wrought depictions of urban life and provided powerful ideas about how interpersonal relations operate in a variety of social contexts. Analyses have taken mappings of local area boundaries as their starting points and then looked into the extent of communal interaction and sentiment within these boundaries. They have thus assumed, a priori, that a significant portion of a person’s interpersonal ties are organized by locality. Such a territorial perspective, searching for community n only within bounded population aggregates, has been especially sensitive to the evaluation of community solidarity in terms of shared values and social integration. Consequently, when observers cannot find much solidary local behaviour and sentiments, they have concluded that “community” has disappeared.
The concept of “neighbourhood” is not
synonymous with the concept of “community”. The contemporary milieu of frequent
residential mobility, spatially-dispersed relationships and activities, instantaneous
distance-free communication, and the movement of interactions from public
spaces to private homes have all limited the amount of observable interactions
in neighbourhoods. This does not mean that community has been lost but that it
is much less likely now to be locally based and locally observed.
A. Little public interaction on street corners,
pubs, etc. in most North American areas.
1. Some suburban and rural areas are
too thinly settled to have large numbers of potential friends readily accessible
through a short walk.
2. Inhospitable weather -- frigid
northern winters, torrid southern summers -- discourage lingering outdoors.
Although this situation has always been true, the contemporary prevalence of
central heating and air-conditioning – coupled with television – lures people
to stay in their homes, their cars, and in shopping malls – but not on their
front porches.
3. Fast food restaurants and
privately-controlled shopping malls discourage communal lingering.
4. Safety concerns have engendered
fears of strangers to be encountered in public places (Newman 1972) and
encouraged walled, guarded and gated enclaves with admittance only to residents, their guests and agents (Judd 1995; Marcuse
1997; Snyder and Blakeley 1997).
5. In the absence of pervasive
wireless support, the Internet keeps people indoors, rooted to their seats
while they surf globally.
B.
Publicly defined neighbourhoods are
often more a product of outsiders' perception than a reality for the residents
of the area.
There is often little fit between outside observers' perception of the
existence of a community, residents' perception of a community, and the actual
existence of a community, as measured by interaction patterns or
ethnic/socioeconomic/ lifestyle homogeneity) (Stutz 1974; Hunter 1979; Krupat
and Guild 1980). Outsiders attribute labels that are often based on an active
visible minority or on stereotypic remembrance of former inhabitants.
C.
Most local interaction occurs close to home and not throughout the neighbourhood. I roughly define the neighbourhood
as interpersonal, non-commercial relationships within a ten-minute walk for
eastern and central Canada and a ten-minute drive for prairie and western Canada.
The great majority of interactions are with fellow residents of one's apartment
floor corridor or face-block, the set of homes on both sides of a street
between two intersecting streets (Michelson 1976; Lee and Campbell 1999;
Wellman and Whitaker 1974; Gillis 1974; Festinger and Back 1963; Gates, Stevens
and Wellman 1973). Thus the concept of "neighbourhood community"
overstates the spatial range of the actual local community of interaction which
may be very local and very small in
D. Most active interpersonal
relationships of North Americans are not with neighbours. For example, in southern Ontario,
only 22 percent of East Yorkers' dozen most active relationships are with
neighbours, while 21 percent are more than 100 miles away (Wellman, Carrington
and Hall 1988). Moreover, neighbours tend to be relatively weak ties,
especially as compared to immediate kin and friends (Wellman and Wortley 1989,
1990; Fischer 1982).
E. Contemporary transportation and
communication facilities, notably the car, plane, phone, fax and internet, have
enabled the easy maintenance of non-local relationships with friends, relatives
and workmates. (Fischer
1982; Wellman and Wortley 1990; Wellman 1992b, 1999b; Wellman and Tindall
1993).
F. The growth in size of cities in
the twentieth-century, coupled with extensive separation (through zoning) of
workplaces and residential areas, means that the community of co-workers no
longer lives in the same neighbourhood. Few friendly relations at work become active ties
afterwards (Wellman 1985; Wellman, Carrington and Hall 1988).
G. Demographic divisions within
neighbourhoods often mean that many neighbours do not interact. Relations often do not cross ethnic
or life-cycle divisions (Breton 1964; Gans 1962; Suttles 1968, 1972). For
example, Lee and Campbell (1999) found that African-Americans and White-Americans
in Nashville who live in the same neighbourhood rarely interact across racial
lines (see also Bleiker 1972; Guldin 1980; Schoenberg 1980; Brettell 1981).
H. High rates of residential
mobility mean that many people do not develop neighbourhood roots. When people move (or contemplate
moving), their allegiances to neighbours decrease, and their ties are to
friends, relatives and workmates who live elsewhere. Frequent
moves to new homes give people less time to meet new neighbours and less interest
in investing in nurturing neighbourly relations (Michelson 1977; Tobery,
Wetherell and Brigham 1990; Fischer 1991; Sampson 1991; Czerny 1994).
i. From Spatial to Social Boundaries
By the 1970s, some scholars had
realized that while some neighbourhoods remained vibrant, the proliferation of
widespread networks of cheap and efficient transportation and communications
had allowed contact to be maintained with greater ease and over longer
distances: in transportation, from railroads through superhighways and planes;
in communication, from overnight mail service to direct long-distance telephone
dialing and the Internet (Meier 1962; Wellman 2001). This led to viewing
community functionally as networks of social relationships rather than
spatially as localities (e.g., Tilly 1974; Craven and Wellman 1973; Wellman and
Leighton 1979). Community became "liberated" (Wellman 1979) from
neighbourhood-centric thinking.
Once communities were defined socially rather
than spatially, than it has become apparent that they persisted, even
flourished, but have been transformed. Rather than being full members of one
solidary local or kinship group, contemporary urbanites now juggle limited
memberships in multiple, specialized, far-flung, interest-based network
communities. The change from local to dispersed communities is old news by now
– apparent to all but politicians and community scholars habituated to thinking
of neighbourhoods as the only possible sources of community. Contemporary
communities rarely are found only in neighbourhoods, as long as one adopts a
social definition of community and not a spatial one (Wellman and Leighton
1979; Wellman 1999). This is because people usually obtain support,
sociability, information and a sense of belonging from those who do not live
within the same neighbourhood and often, not within their own metropolitan
area. People maintain these community ties through phoning, writing, driving,
railroading, transiting, and flying. Neighbourhoods serve principally as bases
from which people make connections with more community members.
Few North Americans have their
principal interpersonal connections with their neighbourhoods. Nor is this only
a North American phenomena. For instance, Nozawa (1997) and Otani (1999)
show that this non-localism is also prevalent in Japan, despite its
many local institutions to promote community and local social control. In Iran,
Bastani (2001a) shows that middle-class Tehranis are members of community
networks that contain a mixture of local and nonlocal ties.
Community interactions have moved
inside the private home — where most entertaining, phone-calling and emailing
take place—and away from chatting with patrons in public spaces such as bars,
street corners and coffee shops. Even when people do go out with others — to restaurants or movie
theatres—they usually leave their neighbourhoods (Lofland 1998). For example,
the percentage of Americans regularly socializing with neighbours has been
steadily declining for at least 25 years. In 1999, only 20 percent spent a
social evening with neighbours several times per week as compared to 30 percent
in 1974. Similarly regularly socializing in pubs has declined from 11 percent
to 8 percent (Smith 1999).
The
increased velocity of transactions has fostered interactional density. The
large-scale metropolis is accessible and links to diverse social networks can
be maintained more readily. Until the nearly simultaneous proliferation of
railroads and telegraphs in the mid-nineteenth century, communication speeds
were about the same as door-to-door transportation speeds. The telegraph
greatly increased the speed of communication. Since then, the effective speed
of transportation has increased two times from the 30 mph of early railroad
speed to 60 mph for automobiles, five times to 150 mph for high-speed trains,
and sixty times to 600 mph for airliners.
Although
the telegraph was generally only used for short, high-priority messages, it was
the harbinger of communication becoming divorced from transportation. The
increased speed of routine communication has been more dramatic than the
increased speed of transportation. Communication has broken loose from the need
to be carried somewhere by someone. As long-distance telephone systems
proliferated and became routinely affordable, the 30 mph speed of mail carried
on early trains has increased by more than 50,000 times. This increase in speed
has made door-to-door communications residual, and made most communications
place-to-place or person-to-person. The length of the message has become a more
salient limiting factor than the distance that the message has to travel.
The
accumulation of research and the transformation of connectivity together suggest
that it is time to stop trying to view present community networks through the
lens of past neighbourhood groups. Community ties continue to be pervasive, but
they now link people across both social and spatial expanses (Laumann 1973;
Craven and Wellman 1973; Granovetter 1982; Ferrand, Mounier and Degenne 1999).
By
avoiding the assumption that people necessarily interact in neighbourhoods,
kinship groups or other bounded solidarities, social network analysts have
studied a wide range of relationships, wherever located and however structured.
Thus Fischer in northern California (1982), Otani (1999) and Nozawa (1997) in
Japan, Wellman’s research group in Toronto (Wellman 1979; Wellman, Carrington
and Hall 1988), Salaff, Fong and Wong in Hong Kong (1999), and Bastani (2001a)
find that residential proximity is at most, only one dimension of community.
Yet, as Lee and Campbell’s analysis of Nashville (1999), Espinoza’s study of
Santiago, Chile (1999), and Hampton and Wellman’s analysis of a heavily ”wired”
Toronto exurb (Hampton 2001; Hampton and Wellman 2002b) also show, the network
approach also supports the analysis of those community ties that do remain in
neighbourhoods. Thus the social network approach is not anti-neighbourhood —
the traditional stuff of community studies — but allows neighbourhood ties to
be discovered without an a priori assumption of their importance.
By
using the social network approach, analysts discovered that community had not
disappeared. Instead, community had moved out of its traditional neighbourhood
base as the constraints of space weakened. Except in situations of ethnic or
racial segregation (e.g., Lee and Campbell 1999; Boal 1972), contemporary
Western communities are rarely tightly-bounded, densely-knit groups of
broadly-based ties. They are usually loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, ramifying
networks of specialized ties. Therefore, analysts should be able to find
community wherever it exists: in neighbourhoods, in family solidarities, or in
networks that reach farther out and include many friends and acquaintances
(Oliver 1988; Wellman 1979; Wellman and Leighton 1979; Fischer 1982).
This
section describes the nature of contemporary communities, analyzing them as
linked to persons and households rather than, as has traditionally been the
case, based in neighbourhoods. One useful approach has been to treat
"community" as "personal community": a social network of
significant, informal "community ties" defined from each person's
standpoint. Membership
in such a network is defined by ties to each focal person, be they
relations of kinship, social closeness, or frequent contact. Personal
community network studies provide Ptolemaic views of networks as they may. The
focus of personal community network studies on the inherently social nature of
community allows scholars to avoid the trap of looking for community only in
spatially-defined areas. Moreover, conceptualizing a person’s community life as
the central node linking together complex interpersonal relationships leads to
quite different analytic concerns from conceptualizing it as a membership in a
discrete solidarity.
The network approach is well-suited
to the study of contemporary life, in which the individual rather than the
household or neighbourhood is paramount. Rather than fitting into the same
group as those around them, each person has her own personal network. Household
members keep separate schedules, with family get-togethers – even common meals
– on the decline. Instead of belonging to two stable kinship groups, people
often have complex household relations, with stepchildren, ex-marital partners
(and their progeny), and multiple sets of in-laws. Communities are far-flung,
loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit and fragmentary. Most people operate in
multiple, partial communities as they deal with shifting, amorphous networks of
kin, neighbours, friends, workmates, and organizational ties. Their activities
and relationships are informal rather than organizationally structured. If they
go bowling, they rarely join formal leagues (Putnam 2000). Only a minority of
network members are directly connected with each another. Most friends and
relatives live in different neighbourhoods; many live in different metropolitan
areas. At work, people often work with distant others and not those
sitting near them (Wellman, Carrington and Hall 1988).
As average North Americans have
informal ties with several hundred to several thousand other people (Kochen
1989; Bernard, et al. 2001), almost all personal community analyses impose stringent
selection criteria on the ties that they take into account. Most studies examine between six and
twenty of the most active ties, and the links that these network
members have with each other (Wellman 1990, 1992a; Walker, Wasserman and
Wellman 1993). Investigators usually use surveys to gather information about
the networks' structure (e.g., links between network members), composition
(e.g., the percentage who are kin), and contents (e.g., social support).
(See Henry 1958; Webber 1964; Kadushin 1966; Tilly 1974; Craven and Wellman
1973; Shulman 1976; Fischer 1975, 1982; Fischer et al. 1977; Wellman and
Leighton 1979; Greisman 1980; Hunter and Riger 1986; Wellman, Carrington and
Hall 1988; Leighton 1986; Wellman 1988,
1999a, 1999b, 2001; Sampson 1991; Wellman and Frank 2001.)
Personal
community network studies have meshed well with mainstream survey research techniques.
Researchers have typically interviewed an (often large) sample of focal persons,
asking about the composition, relational patters, and contents of “their”
networks. Analysts typically select a random sample from a neighbourhood or
metropolitan area and trace the residents’ network relationships to wherever
they may be found. To measure network density, they typically ask the focal
persons in their samples to report about relationships among the members of
their networks. Such studies, began in Detroit (Laumann 1969a, 1969b, 1973) and
Toronto (Coates 1996; Coates, Moyer and Wellman 1969; Craven and Wellman 1973;
Wellman 1968) in the 1960s and have flourished ever since. Many psychologists,
sociologists and social workers have concentrated on studying the social
support that community networks provide: the supportive resources that community
ties convey and their consequences for mental and physical well-being and
longevity (see the reviews in Fischer 1984; Wellman 1990, 1992b, 1993). For
example, researchers have found that people with larger, more diversified
personal communities were less susceptible to common colds and produced less
mucus (Cohen et al., 1997).
The demonstration of the pervasiveness and importance
of personal community networks has
rebutted fears that large-scale social transformations have produced widespread
social isolation in an alienated “mass society” (e.g., Kornhauser 1959). If
analysts focus more on social ties and systems of informal resource exchange
than on people living in neighbourhoods and villages, community can be seen.
Community has rarely disappeared from societies. It has been transformed. New
forms of network community have supplanted old neighbourhood community
forms. Since the 1970s, many
studies have documented the existence, scope and importance of personal
community networks in a variety of social systems around the world. Wherever studied, personal communities usually share
the characteristics detailed in the rest of this section, although North
American personal communities exhibit these characteristics more strongly (Wellman
1999a).
B. Personal Communities are Multiple, Partial, Heterogeneous and
Sparsely-Knit Social Networks
Personal
communities contain about a half-dozen intimate ties and perhaps a dozen
active, if not quite intimate, ties out of the total of about 1,000 to 1,500 informal
interpersonal relationships that many people maintain (Boissevain 1974; Pool
and Kochen 1978; Kochen 1989). Many community networks contain about half kin
and half friends, neighbours and workmates. Few people maintain active
community ties with all or most of their kinfolk. They usually contain only one
or two intimate neighbouring or workmate relationships, but 6 to 10 weaker
community ties with neighbours and workmates. In Toronto in 1978, the average
active community network tie stretched a mean of nine miles between residences
(Wellman, Carrington and Hall 1988). People know only six or seven neighbours
well enough to speak with. (Gates, Stevens and Wellman 1973).
Most
personal communities are essentially sparsely knit and loosely bounded. For
example, the density of 0.33 in the average Torontonian’s personal communities
means that only one-third of a person's active community members have active
ties with each other (Wellman 1979, Wellman and Wortley 1990). Moreover, these
networks become even more sparsely-knit as people age and their networks get
more complex: Mean network density declined from 0.33 to 0.13 over a decade
(Wellman, et al. 1997). It is difficult to mobilize collective support or
social control in such sparsely-knit networks. People must actively maintain
their sparsely-knit ties and fragmented networks. By contrast, in groups it is
easier for people to sit back and let group dynamics and densely-knit structures
do the work. That is why friendship networks are less apt than kinship networks
to persist in times of overload (Hurlbert, Haines and Beggs 2000).
Active
community networks typically comprise one core cluster of densely-knit
relations, one or two small social circles, and one or two isolates who know no
one in the network other than the individual who is the centre of her personal
community. Both dense, bounded groups and sparse, unbounded networks exist simultaneously
in communities. Indeed, the same persons may be involved in both, as they
iterate between communities, or as the communities themselves change in response
to external situations and internal dynamics. Because community ties are rarely
tightly bounded within a single network, they act as "local bridges"
which indirectly connect members of one community with another (Granovetter
1973, 1982). People have an increased ability to connect with a large number of
social milieus, and a concomitantly decreased involvement with any one milieu.
Cross-cutting ties link and integrate social milieus, instead of “little box”
groups being isolated and tightly-bounded.
The
complex and specialized nature of personal communities means that these are
fragmented networks. Sparsely-knit, fragmentary, loosely-bounded communities
make it possible to reach many people through short chains of “friends of
friends” (Boissevain 1974). Yet in such networks people cannot depend on the
goodwill or social control of a cohesive community. Instead, they often must
actively search, maintain and mobilize their ramifying ties, one-by-one, to
deal with their affairs rather than relying on solidary communities to do their
maintenance work. Indeed, a variety of research into guanxi networking
shows this to be true even in once-reputedly solidary China (Gold, Guthrie and
Wank 2001; Freeman and Ruan 1997; Lin 1997; Ruan, et al., 1997). In both Japan
(Otani 1999) and North America (Wellman and Frank 2001; Wellman and Gulia
1999b; Wellman 1979; Wellman and
Wortley 1989, 1990; Fischer 1982), the kinship system as such does not supply
much social support: Extended kin are rarely supportive, although a few
immediate kin — parents, children and
siblings — are quite supportive.
These
multiple communities increase choices in the milieus in which people can
participate and with which they can identify. Communities of shared interest
thrive, including “communities of practice” of people working at similar jobs
who share concerns and triumphs (Wenger 1998). Just because community networks
are sparsely-knit, that does not mean that they connect all persons (Lee and
Campbell 1999; Laumann 1966; Wellman and Gulia 1999b). These clusters organize
flows of resources and norms. Even when ties connect people with different
social characteristics, they do so
unevenly. In addition, high rates of social and residential mobility leave in
their wake cross-cutting ties between people with different social
characteristics (Ferrand, Mounier and Degenne 1999; Herting, Grusky and Van
Rompaey 1997).
This
complexity fosters increased emphasis on structural position in different
networks – such as brokerage ties that connect multiple networks. A person may
be central in one community, peripheral in the second, and a key broker for the
third. Concomitantly, there is decreased emphasis on group membership. Active
networking is more important than going along with the group. At the same time,
there is probably decreased identification with community. Because people
belong to multiple, non-exclusive communities, they do not belong to one
visible, palpable community. This can reduce their identification with a
community. Belonging to multiple communities increases maneuverability and
opportunity, but makes interactions more contingent and uncertain.
C. Many
Specialized Communities are Based on Shared Interests
Many interpersonal ties are based only on the specialized
roles that people play— and not on the whole persons. These relationships are
between fragments of selves, rather than between whole selves. Most ties are
specialized, with different community members supplying emotional support, information,
material aid, social identity and a sense of belonging (Wellman and Wortley
1990; see also Fischer 1982; Castells 1997).
Instead
of total involvement in a single solidary community, the personal mobility and
connectivity that are the hallmarks of the industrial and information ages have
replaced solidarity with partial specialized communities. People are members of
multiple communities, each containing at most partially-overlapping sets of
network members. Interactions with network members are principally in duets,
two couples, and informal get-togethers of friends and relatives. These are not
simple, homogenous strictures but heterogeneous compositions and sparsely-knit
structures. Such communities comprise people who share an interest, be it a consummatory
avocation (a community of stamp collectors) or a problem-solving community
interested in achieving or protecting a goal, such as a community of small
business owners. Claude Fischer (1975) has argued that such subcultural
communities are a key organizing principle of contemporary life. Specialized
communities of interests consist of either like-minded people – such as BMW
325ix drivers – or people occupying complementary roles – such as sadists and
masochists. Some are "communities of practice" (Dorsey 1994; Orr
1996; Wenger 1998; Cross and Borgatti 2000; Lipnack and Stamps
2000), people informally exchanging
problem-solving information within companies or shared interest-areas. Scholarly communities exchange ideas
and validate interests (Crane 1972; Walsh and Bayama 1996; Owen-Smith 2001). Although
specialized communities predate the Internet, they are flourishing as the
Internet's capabilities develop and groups give way to personalized
connectivity (Kim 2002).
D. Personal
Communities Provide a Variety of Socially Supportive Resources
When people need help, they can either buy it, trade for it,
steal it, get it from governments and charities, or obtain it through their
personal communities: supportive ties with friends, relatives, neighbours and
workmates. Such ties supply “network capital,” the form of “social capital” that makes
resources available through interpersonal ties. It is widely available, usually
specialized, and unevenly distributed among people, ties and networks. Network
members provide emotional aid, material aid, information, companionship, and a
sense of belonging. Their “social support” is one of the main ways that
households obtain resources to deal with daily life, seize opportunities, and reduce
uncertainties (Wellman 1979; Willmott 1986, 1987, Pahl .
Both
scholars and the public have traditionally thought of communities as composed
of broadly-based relationships in which each community member felt securely
able to obtain a variety of help. Although people gain a wide range of support
from their community networks, most of their ties provide
specialized ties, supplying only a few kinds of social support (see also the
reviews in Wellman 1988, 1992b). For example, some relationships provide
emotional support while others help with household needs. Multiple,
sparsely-knit communities composed of specialized ties mean that people must
work to maintain a differentiated portfolio of potentially supportive
relationships. They can no longer assume that any or all of their relationships
will help them, no matter what is the problem When they have problems, they
must actively seek out resources. In market terms, people must shop at
specialized boutiques for needed resources instead of casually dropping in at a
general store. Like boutique shoppers,
people who only have a few network members supplying one kind of support
have insecure sources of supply. If the relationship ends — if the boutique
closes — the supply of that particular
type of support may disappear. Nor is all help actively sought (Wellman 1982, 1992b; Pescosolido
1992).
The support provided by personal communities is efficient, low-cost, flexible, customized, and more controllable than aid from bureaucracies. At a larger scale, the transformation of national and global societies into “network societies” (Wellman 1988, 1996, 2001; Castells 1996, 2000) suggests the usefulness of thinking of social capital as a product of personal community networks as well as of formally institutionalized groups.
There
is a range of evidence from different societies. In France, kin and neighbours
engage in mutual aid, but friends and neighbours are the confidants (Ferrand,
Mounier and Degenne 1999). In California, there are differences between
trouble-shooting kin and companionable friends (Fischer 1982; Schweizer,
Schnegg and Berzborn 1998). In Toronto, active community members usually supply
only one or two out of the five types of social support, for example, small services
and emotional aid but not large services, companionship or financial aid (Hall
and Wellman 1985; Wellman and Wortley 1989, 1990). By contrast, Toronto
spouses supply each other with all types of social support (Wellman and Wellman
1992). Those network members who provide small services or emotional aid rarely
provide large services, companionship or financial aid (Wellman, Carrington and
Hall 1988; Wellman and Wortley 1989, 1990). Parents and adult children provide
the widest range of support although they rarely supply sociable companionship.
Accessible ties — people living or working near-by, or otherwise in frequent
in-person or telecommunications contact — provide important goods and services
(Wellman and Wortley 1990). The
strength of ties is important, with socially-close voluntary and multiple-role
ties providing high levels of support. For example, coworkers who are friends exchange
more email (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 1998). Yet socially
heterogeneous weak ties have their importance: linking sparsely-knit
communities, providing a wider range of
information, and interconnecting groups in societies.
The
contingent supportiveness of these fragmented communities has broader societal
effects. The support they provide strengthens both community and societal bonds
while supplying needed resources (Fischer 1982; Wellman 1999a; Schweizer, et
al. 1998). For society, these communities develop network capital that conveys
resources, confirms identity, influences behaviour, and reinforces integrative
links between individuals, households and groups (Durkheim 1893; Espinoza 1999;
Ferrand, Mounier and Degenne 1999; Castells 2000; Popielarz 1999).
E. Communities
Operate as Both Interpersonal Duets and Network Ensembles
The
shift in perspective from a communal to a network view of community has
probably lagged the shift in social structure. Although almost all people
possess community ties of sociability and support, many of these ties are only
weakly connected. They function as dyads and small clusters, and not as
densely-knit groups. This suggests that tie characteristics may have more
effect than network characteristics on the provision of social support and
network capital. As the network is dominated by the tie, the individual persona
becomes an even more active player of the network capital game, rather than sitting
back passively and letting social support come from a group (Burt 1992; Wellman
1999a, 1999b).
Yet there is more to interpersonal
life than just individuals and ties. People are often immersed in communities
filled with companionship, emotional support or caring for others whose
dynamics go beyond the level of the individual relationship. Hence the
compositional and structural characteristics of networks must be taken
into account (Hogan and Eggbeen 1995). Larger, more
heterogeneous and denser community
provide more support. A network is more than the sum of its ties. (Wellman and Gulia 1999b, Wellman and
Frank 2001). The
availability of network capital is affected by individual “agency”
(self-organized actions on one’s own behalf), ties dancing interpersonal duets,
and the constraints and opportunities provided by networks with
different sorts of structure and composition. (There are also the effects of
the environing society, but that is beyond this report’s analytic scope.) Not
only do people need – and want – to know which kinds of people (individual-level)
and relationships (tie-level) are apt to provide different kinds of
support, they also need and want to know the extent to which their social
networks as a whole can support them (network-level).
The
composition and structure of community networks (what sociologists call
“emergent properties”) affect the provision of support beyond the effects of
the characteristics of the ties in these networks. Kin are called on more for support
when they are enmeshed in densely-knit communities with high proportions of
kin. Adult sons are more likely to aid their elderly parents when there are not
any adult daughters available (Stone, Rosenthal and Connidis 1998; Wellman and
Frank 2001). People navigate nimbly through partial involvements in multiple
networks, as members of these networks they are subject to the networks’
constraints and opportunities. The helpfulness of ties is enhanced by being in
a network rich in material resources. (Lai, Lin and Leung 1998) and in frequent
contact with each other (Wellman and Frank 2001).
Cross-level effects show that the
characteristics of both ties and networks affect the provision of social
support. Take the case of reciprocity. Small acts provided by immediate alters
are likely to be reciprocated quickly. In the event of failed reciprocity, the
losses are minimal. However, larger forms of support may not be directly or
immediately reciprocated. Thus they occur in a context where the commitment is
to the network – or some component of it – and the likely eventual benefit is derived
through the network rather than through specific reciprocal acts between ego
and alter. For example,, immediate family members provide multiple forms of
support through a commitment to the family that is beyond a commitment to ego.
Social
support is rarely a zero-sum game. Companionship is usually a mutual benefit,
while helping others increases one’s own standing in the community. It gives
the giver the satisfaction of seeing oneself as a worthwhile contributor, and
raises the level of overall supportiveness (Schweizer and White 1998). For example,
providing others with emotional support often increases happiness and decreases
stress levels (Pennebaker 1990). Not only does “it takes a village to raise a
child” (Clinton 1996), the support provided increases the village’s overall
level of social capital and civic trust. Hence the structure of the networks is
important as a background factor: for
its sparse interconnections, allowing people to participate in many
worlds. In communities of shared interest, networks provide contexts for
similar people to act similarly and to observe each other acting similarly. It
is the composition of these networks which is important, often connecting
similar people who have experienced similar life events and have similar
interests (see also Suitor, Pillemer and Bohanon 1993).
It is not that people's communities are
disintegrating, but that they are in flux. More research has gone into studies
of community networks during one time period than into studying how they change
into time. My research group was able to study change over a decade in
Torontonians’ strongest (“intimate”) ties with friends and relatives
(Wellman, et al. 1997). Consistent with the shift in community from groups to
networks in flux, the most striking thing about our findings is how much in
flux are close community relationships. Only a minority of such “intimate” ties
persisted through the decade, and most intimate networks – the core of
communities – contain a majority of people who were not there ten years ago.
Although it is possible that these newfound intimates had once been weaker
ties, this is generally not the case. When network members stop being
intimates, their ties become weak or non-existent.
Few
people have stable community networks. For example, only 28 percent of
Torontonians’ intimate ties were still intimate a decade later. Thirty-six
percent of the once-intimate ties became less active over the decade, while the
rest became very weak or disappeared. Although kinship ties are more stable,
only 34 percent of intimate kinship ties remained intimate a decade later while
another 28 percent continued as active, but not intimate, relationships
(Wellman, et al. 1997).
Changes
in family situations accompanying normal aging, rather than aging itself,
account for much of the turnover that these respondents have experienced.
Marital change is the dominant process, with those getting in or out of
marriage changing the networks the most. Getting married or divorced compels
people to have much emotional and social adaptation which results in great turnover
of intimate ties.
Turnover
in these personal communities is driven by two phenomena. Those Torontonians
who did not undergo marital change turned over nearly two-thirds of their
intimate ties over a decade, replacing over an average of four relationships in
ten years. This suggests a gradual shift, with one intimate tie being replaced
every two or three years. By contrast, those who experienced marital change
almost completely replaced their intimate ties. This suggests a more
cataclysmic upheaval in intimate relationships, associated with marriage. Just
as in biological evolution, personal community networks may experience gradual
mutation that is punctuated by intense rapid shifts (Gould 1992). Both sorts of
change reflect combinations of adaptation to outside circumstances, random
variation, evolutionary differentiation, and normal wear-and-tear.
The turn away from door-to-door contact and towards
place-to-place contact has been a two-fold turn away from involvement in a
single place and a single group. It is conceptually and practically important
to avoid conflating these two turnings. The shift to place-to-place contact
enables people to find community while not being bound up in either their
physical neighbourhood (place) and their neighbourhood community (group). Yet
place-to-place contact means that localities may be still important but these
localities may be far from where people live. It is the intersection of what
Manuel Castells (1996, 2000) has called the traditional “space of places” and
the developing “space of flows”.
The transition from group to
networked connectivity has meant a shift from the settlement to the household
and workgroup as the primary units of activity. If “community” is defined
socially rather than spatially, then it is clear that contemporary communities
rarely are limited to neighbourhoods. They are communities of shared interest
rather than communities of shared kinship or locality.
People usually obtain support,
companionship, information and a sense of belonging from those who do not live
within the same neighbourhood or even within the same metropolitan area. People
maintain these ties through phoning, emailing, writing, driving, railroading,
transiting, and flying (Wellman 2000a; Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2001;
Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002). At the same time, people
easily maintain dispersed relationships by telecommunications (with telephones
recently being joined by faxes, electronic mail and the Web) and transportation
(based on cars, expressways and airplanes). In Toronto, being within one hour's
drive or within the local telephone zone — and not being in the same
neighbourhood — is the effective boundary for high levels of face-to-face
contact and social support (Wellman, Carrington and Hall 1988; Wellman and
Tindall 1993).
Local
ties often become distant ones due to the continuing high rate of residential
mobility in the developed world and the rapid growth of long-distance mobility
in the Third World (Cadwallader 1992). Many relationships stretch even further
than the metropolitan area, with an appreciable number spanning the continent
or the ocean. For example, migrants to a wired suburb near Toronto have been
better able to maintain their ties than those who do not have Internet access
(Hampton and Wellman 2001, 2002a).
The
lack of total involvement in a locality and the presence of community members
living elsewhere weakens local commitment. The local has not been lost, but has become just one or
two home bases from which people venture out to network. Neighbourhoods and
that other “local” home base, work units, have become relatively safe milieus
from which people sally forth from their households and workplaces in their
cars, telephone from their kitchens and offices, or email from their dens and
desktops. Community interactions have moved inside the private home — where most
entertaining, phone-calling and emailing take place — and away from chatting
with patrons in public spaces such as bars, street corners and coffee shops
(Putnam 2000; Wellman and Leighton 1979; Fischer 1982, 1984).
People’s personal communities are
“glocalized”: extensively global but also intensely local (see also Robertson
1992). Yet this occurs within household walls and not neighbourhood boundaries.
Place – in the form of households and work units remains important – even if
neighbourhood or village does not. Personal communities are both household
bound but with ties much less constrained by distance than in previous
generations. Households and work units are important bases of interaction. They
also provide places from which their automobiles, (wired) phones and Internet
connections operate. Glocalized networks operate more independently of their
surrounding environment than little-box groups. This is not social
disintegration. People and places are connected. Yet there is little social or
physical intersection with the intervening spaces between households. It is
place-to-place connectivity, and not door-to-door. People often get on an
expressway near their home and get off near their friend or colleague’s home
with little sense of what is in-between. Airplane travel and email are even
more context-less.
Homes have become bases for
privatized relationships that are more voluntary and selective than those that
functioned in the public spaces of the past. By contrast to traditional
meetings in village squares or pubs, friends and relatives get together in
private as small sets of singles or couples, but rarely as communal groups. There is probably less investment in
public life: local politics, community groups, and civic organizations.
Relationships are more selective, and social closeness does not mean physical
closeness Networks now contain high proportions of people who enjoy one other.
They contain low proportions of people who are forced to interact with each
other because they are juxtaposed in the same.
Glocalized place-to-place connectivity, based
on inter-household networks, creates a more fluid system for accessing
resources, be they material, cognitive, or influential. Switching and maneuvering
among networks, people can use ties to one network to bring resources to
another. Knowing how to network (on and offline) becomes a human capital
resource, and having a supportive network becomes a social capital resource,
creating the possibility of linkage, trade and cooperation (Lin 2001; Wellman
and Frank 2001). For example, the Italian-American “urban villagers” studied by
Herbert Gans (1962) could not prevent their door-to-door community from being
destroyed by a municipal-developer alliance intent on building new high-rises.
Their bounded community had no links to politically powerful coalitions outside
of their Boston neighbourhood. Not only do people living in insalubrious
neighbourhoods suffer, thus those without networking resources are interpersonally adrift.
Although
Torontonians’ communities are dispersed, on a daily basis, most of their
face-to-face interactions are with people who live or work near them. Torontonians
even have much of their telephone contact with neighbours (Wellman, et al.
1997). Thus, even spatially liberated people cannot avoid neighbours. Local
relationships are necessary for domestic safety, controlling actual land-use,
and quickly getting goods and services, as Jane Jacobs (1961) has pointed out
for North America in the 1950s and others have reaffirmed for contemporary
North America (Lee and Campbell 1999; Wellman and Gulia 1999b; Sampson,
Morenoff and Earls 1999). Moreover, when transportation, communication and
security are scarce, local ties assume more importance as Charles Tilly (1973)
has argued for portions of preindustrial Europe, Vicente Espinoza (1999) shows
for impoverished Chileans, and the daily newspapers show for fearful residents
of Bosnia, Chechnya, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and post-attack New York.
As such, place-to-place connectivity
has dual resource control imperatives as Charles Tilly pointed out when he
wondered under what circumstances “do communities act?” (1973, see also Tilly
2000). On the one hand, the security of the household base and its surroundings
are important, and neighbours are scarcely known and not knit into a strong
network. This makes a household’s local politics one of securing the property
and area with guarded gates; getting people as neighbours with the “right”
demographics and lifestyle; encouraging a strong, responsive police presence.
On the other hand, residents want high-speed, unfettered access to the
Internet, expressways and airports to facilitate their links with people in
other places (Hampton and Wellman 1999). Their security concerns combine
traditional fears of burglary with new needs for anti-virus checkers, spam and
obscenity filters, disk backups, and firewall-like protection against hacker
intrusion.
Control of resources in such
place-to-place systems is a mixture of control of property and control of
networking. Knowing how to network (on and offline) becomes a human capital
resource, and having a supportive network becomes a social capital resource
(Wellman and Wortley 1990). The cost is the loss of a palpably present and
visible local community to provide a strong identity and belonging. The gain is
the increased diversity of opportunity, greater scope for individual agency,
and the freedom from a single group’s constrictive control.
There is a contextual vacuum in
relationships based on place-to-place community as compared to door-to-door
community. The most obvious manifestations of this are expressway travel, telephones
(since party lines became passé before World War II; see Fischer 1992) and,
more recently, e-mail. The places are connected, but there is no social or
physical intersection with the spaces the connection has passed through until
it arrives at the portal. People often get on a near-by expressway entrance and
get off near their friend/kin’s house with little sense of what has lay
in-between. Airplane travel is even more context-less, despite occasional gasps
as the Rockies or the Alps are sighted beneath the clouds.
Glocalized
place-to-place community links households as well as people (Wellman and
Leighton 1979; Wellman 1979, 1999a). People go from some-where to some-where
to meet one or more persons, usually inside homes. Or people call some-where–to
a home or office–to talk to the household: either a particular someone or
whoever answers. The household or work unit is what is visited, telephoned or
emailed. Relations
within the household or work unit continue to be somewhat communal, supportive
and controlling. They are the home bases from which people reach out in-person
and ethereally, to engage with their networks. Yet home-based networks often
function in private spaces that do not involve surrounding local areas. Moreover,
community ties (among married couples) frequently involve both husbands and
wives in the western world. They see their friends in common, interact with
each other’s families, and get support from in-laws as easily as they get
support from their own kin.
Thus
community ties have become private relationships that do not involve the local
area (Wellman 1985; Wellman and Wellman 1992). The sparse and unbounded nature
of community networks afford people more discretion in the persons, places, and
times of their interactions. Such networks frequently have more physical
barriers to access and interaction. For example it is rare for a North American
urbanite to go bounding into another's home without a previous invitation and a
knock on the door (Michelson 1976). Because of the difficulty of coordinating
sparse networks, interactions are more apt to be one-on-one, and much information
tends to be privately held within a dyad or selectively shared with
sparsely-knit sets of similarly-minded network members.
The
absence of near-by friends and well-used convivial public spaces means that
people do not go out into the neighbourhood to find much community. Instead,
they have selective encounters, singly or in couples, with dispersed community
network members. Rather than operating out of public neighbourhood spaces,
contemporary communities usually operate out of private homes. Homes have
become bases for relationships that are more voluntary and selective in than
the public communities of the past. Friends and relatives get together as small
sets of singles or couples, but rarely as communal groups (Wellman 1992b). This
voluntary selectivity means that communities have become homogeneous networks
of people with similar attitudes and life-styles (Feld 1981).
Yet
the easy accessibility of local relationships means that those local ties that
do exist are significant. Although neighbours (living within one mile) comprise
only 22 percent of Torontonians' active ties, these neighbours engage in fully
42 percent of all interactions with active network members (Wellman 1996).
Driving a car or staying home and using the telephone or e‑mail offer
little opportunity en route for the casual contact and new encounters that can
diversify lives. Cars leave garages as sealed units, opened only on reaching
the other's home; telephones and modems stay indoors, sustaining closed duets
with already-known others. The shift from individualized to chain and franchised
stores provides a commodified, cleansed and sanitised experience.
Where
North Americans a generation ago often spent Saturday night going out for a
movie and pizza, they now invite a few friends over to their homes to watch
videos and order a pizza to be delivered. At the same time, the proliferation
of home computers facilitates the tendency of "knowledge workers" to
use the home as a work site, either as the place for workaholics bringing work
home or for teleworkers routinely spending some or all of their work time in
home-based work (Salaff, et al. 2000).
As
Toronto pundit Marshall McLuhan observed (1973), North Americans go out to be
private — in streets where no one greets each another — but they stay inside to
be public — to meet their friends and relatives. Public spaces have become
residual places to pass through or to shop in. Rather than participating in
clubs or organizations, when they do go out, North Americans usually go out
alone, in couples or in small, informal groups (Wuthnow 1998; Putnam 2000).
When Torontonians do go out to the movies, most (55 percent) go alone or in
pairs (Oh 1991). The community of the pub in the Cheers television show
was appealing because it is rare (Wortley, Wellman and Eliany 1992). In
reality, only 10 percent of adult Canadians go to a pub once a week or more. Suburban
shopping malls have become residual agoras — for consumption purposes only but
not for discussion.
As community has become private, people feel responsible for their “own” — the members of their community networks with whom they have strong ties — but not for the many acquaintances and strangers with whom they rub shoulders but are not otherwise connected. Private contact with familiar friends and relatives has so replaced public gregariousness that people pass each other unsmiling on streets. This privatization may be responsible for the lack of informal help for strangers who are in trouble in public spaces (Latané and Darley 1976). It is probably also a reason why people feel that they lack friends and are surrounded by strangers even when their networks are abundantly supportive (Lofland 1973).
The emphasis on within-household
interaction and the de-emphasis on neighbourly community means that the search
for the right neighbourhood is not necessarily a search for the right set of
community interactors. It may well be a matter of a search for safety in local
areas and within the home, and the community that is sought for less-mobile
elderly and children (getting “the right school”) than for mobile adults.
Paradoxically, because the lack of neighbourhood community means that
neighbours cannot be relied on to preserve local safety – what Jane Jacobs
(1961) has called “eyes on the street”– household insecurity may increase the
premium for living in the right area. If one has no confidence that friendly
neighbours will keep an eye on things, then safe location becomes more
important. Thus the value on living in the right place may be another sign of
individual and household privatization rather than a sign of a premium on
neighbourhood community.
H. Communities
Have Become Domesticated and Feminized
The public community of earlier eras was
largely a man's game. Until well into this century, men customarily gathered in
communal, quasi-public milieus, such as pubs, cafes, parks and village greens
(Roche 1981; Stearns 1990; Rotberg 2001; Ethington 1994; Tilly 1975, 1978,
1984).
Rather
than engaging in public community, women have typically visited each other's
homes in small numbers to provide companionship and domestic support (Hansen
1994). Consequently women's communities have been smaller and more private than
men's. (See Duby 1985; Garrioch 1986; Gullestad 1984; Roche 1981; Roncière
1985; Sharma 1986; Vicinus 1985).
Although there have been many women’s organizations (Clemens 2001), when
women have left their homes to do paid work, shopping or child care, they
returned directly home afterwards (Elshtain 1981; Mackenzie 1988; Shorter 1975;
Tilly and Scott 1978; Lofland 1995). The nineteenth century "cult of domesticity
... [preached that while] men took care of business and politics, women devoted
themselves to the life of the home" (Wall 1990, pp. 144-145; se also Cott
1977).
While
men now spend more time at home instead of at bars or cafes, the high
percentage of women engaged in paid work outside their homes means that women
spend less time at home. Men and women often lead asynchronous lives, with
different time schedules and few family members (Putnam 2000; Zamir, Volker and
Flap 2001; McPherson and Ranger-Moore 1991; Harvey and Taylor 2000). When husbands and wives do happen to be
together, they are apt to stay at home, for they are in no mood to go out and
socialize after their weary trips home from work. In any event, zoning regulations
in North America often place commercial areas for recreation far from home.
Domestic pursuits dominate, with husbands and wives spending evenings and
weekends together instead of the men going off to pubs and street corners, and
few women being home during the day. Workaholics bring their computer disks
home; couch potatoes rent videos.
The
men have now joined the women: Their communities have moved inside, into
private homes. Homes have become appreciably larger and more suitable for
entertaining (Ward 1999). A smaller number of children means less opportunity
to meet the parents of playmates, traditional an important vector of developing
local ties (Gates, Stevens and Wellman 1973). The separation of work from
residential localities means that co-workers commute from different
neighbourhoods and no longer come home from work in solidary sociable groups.
The lure of air conditioning, clothes dryers, television and the Internet has
brought both men and women indoors to their households instead of spending time
on front porches, pubs and cafes. As a result, they chat less with their
neighbours, and are less able to provide mutual aid, or exercise social control
over each other, their children, and unwanted strangers (see also Jacobs 1961;
Galston 1999).
In
their domestic headquarters, many Northern American couples operate their
networks jointly (Wellman and Wellman 1992). The household has been the key interacting unit in
place-to-place communities. In-laws are as supportive as own-kin (Wellman
1999a). Usually it is the household that exchanges support
rather than the person: For example, our Toronto research found in-laws to be
as supportive as blood relatives (Wellman and Wortley 1989). By contrast to the
specialized support that community members exchange, spouses supply each other
with almost all types of social support (Wellman and Wellman 1992). Besides not
getting domestic social support, unmarried do not have access to the supportive
networks that accompany spouses to marriage.
In
contemporary place-to-place communities, married women not only participate in
community, they dominate the practice of it in their households. Women have
historically been the "kinkeepers" of western society: mothers and
sisters keeping relatives connected for themselves, their husbands and their
children. They have become the pre-eminent suppliers of emotional support in
community networks as well as the major suppliers of domestic services to
households (Wellman 1992a). With their men at home, wives have added the burden
of maintaining their husband's friendships to their traditional role of
maintaining ties with their own friends and with their own and their husband's
kin. The privatization and domestication of community, community-keeping has
become an extension of kinkeeping, with both linked to domestic management.
The
move of men's friendships into households is not just a change in venue. It has
affected how friendships are maintained, how they are interrelated, and how
friendship itself is defined. Despite recent moves in the direction of
symmetric marriages, homes remain women's domain. No longer do husbands and
wives have many separate friendships. As men now usually stay at home during
their leisure time, the informal ties of their wives form the basis for
relations between married couples. Women have come to define the nature of
friendship and help maintain many of their husbands' friendships. With the
greater participation of men in household activities, informal ties among women
form the basis for many of the men's friendship relations between couples.
Wives recruit most new friends and neighbours and arrange most get-togethers
between couples and family members (including in-laws). Husbands and wives now
have more integrated friendships, men do not routinely rely on their friends to
accomplish important tasks outside of the household, and the intellectual
climate treats friendship as a
relationship in which women excel ((Griffin 1981; Sherr Klein 1981; MacInnis,
1991).
With
the great majority of women doing paid work as well as domestic house work,
their “double-load” of domestic work and paid work (Shelton 1992) has expanded
to a “triple load” that now includes community “net work”. Because women are
the community-keepers and are pressed for time, men become even more cut off
from male friendship groups. The heavy involvement of women in paid work,
combined with the separation of the workplace from the residence, has caused couples
to focus their friendships on small domestic get-togethers. As husbands and
wives work together more in raising families, their friends become integrated
and their kinship relations become more similar to their friendship ties.
While
friendships continue to flourish in these glocalized, place-to-place
households, they are different from what they used to be. Although the
situation varies over time and between localities, friendships between North
Americans -- men and women -- now operate out of homes rather than
public spaces. For example, the separation of home from work and the
development of introverted homes set off in areas without usable public spaces
has affected the kinds of friendships men can have. At the same time that men
have increased their domestic involvement, they have lost access to male
hang-outs. They have few ties to their neighbours. Friendships are now private
affairs between residentially-dispersed buddies or couples. This domestication
of community is apt to intensify as the Internet make it easier for people to
maintain ties from the safety, comfort and privacy of their own homes. Private
contact with familiar friends replaces public gregariousness. Rather than
getting together in permeable public spaces, where friends-of-friends can meet
and bystanders can join in conversations, current visits are by invitation
only.
Thus
the privatization and domestication of relationships have transformed the
nature of community. The nature and success of their friendships are being
defined in domestic, women's, terms. Just as husbands and wives are more
involved with each other at home, the focus of couples and male friends is on
private, domestic relations. Men's friendships have come to be defined as
women's always have been -- relations of emotional support, companionship and
domestic services (Pleck 1975; Rubin 1985; Lyman 1987; Allan 1989). Women's
ties, which dominate community networks, provide important support for dealing
with domestic work. Community members help with daily hassles and crises;
neighbours mind each other's children; sisters and friends provide emotional
support for child, husband and elder care. The material comfort of most North
Americans means they no longer need to rely on maintaining good relations with
kin, friends and neighbours to get the necessities for material survival.
Although men and women do give each other important material help, these are
often more matters of convenience than
necessity. Yet those living near-by are still depended on for physical
aid – providing goods and services (Wellman and Wortley 1999; Wellman and Frank
2001). The relative lack of such ties means people can become dependent on the
less tailored, sometimes careless help
of paid professional services.
Friendships
have become ends in themselves, to be enjoyed in their own right and used for
emotional adjustment in a society which puts a premium on feeling good about
oneself and others. This resonates with contemporary feminist celebration of
women for being more qualified in the socioemotional skills that are the basis
of contemporary communities — and the downgrading of the allegedly masculine
qualities of instrumentalism and materialism (Griffin 1981; Sherr Klein 1981;
MacInnis, 1991). Community is no longer about men fixing cars together; it is
about couples chatting about domestic problems.
PART THREE: Computer Networks and Networked Communities
I. IS THE INTERNET INCREASING, DECREASING, OR TRANSFORMING
COMMUNITY?
This
section discusses the interplay between the development of computer-mediated
communication – especially the Internet – and the nature of community (see also
Wellman 2000a). Often
computer networks and social networks work conjointly, with computer networks
linking people in social networks, and with people bringing their offline
situations to bear when they use computer networks to communicate.
These ties have transformed cyberspace into cyberplaces, as people
connect online with kindred spirits, engage in supportive and sociable
relationships with them, and imbue their activity online with meaning,
belonging and identity.
Just as the flexibility of less-bounded, spatially dispersed social networks
creates demand for the world wide web and collaborative communication, the
breathless development of computer networks nourishes societal transitions from
little boxes to social networks.
Can
people find community online in the Internet? Can relationships between people
who never see, smell or hear each other be supportive, companionable and
provide social identity? While the debate continues (Kraut, et al. 2001), the
Internet gets used by a majority of North Americans (Feong, et al. 2001;
Wellman, et al. 2002; Kew, Wellman and Chen 2002). The number of users
continues to grow, in North America and abroad, although the slowing rate of
growth may indicate a “plateauing“ effect with the percentage of North American
Internet users stabilizing at upwards of 60 percent of adults, at least for the
short term (Reddick, Boucher and Groseillers 2000).
A. Is
the Internet Increasing Community?
Utopians
have claimed that the Internet provides new and better ways of communication,
while dystopians have argued that the Internet takes people away from their
communities and families. The celebration of dense, bounded village-like
groups of community and work pervades one strain of thought about the impact of
the Internet. Many see it as a boon for the alienated and isolated who will no
longer be huddled in front of their television screens.
Some
go beyond seeing the Internet as enhancing community to seeing it as
transforming it by creating new forms of online interaction and enhancing
offline relationships: In this scenario, video screens have become magic
communicators enabling people to use online discussion groups, bulletin board
systems, virtual chat rooms, and the like to make meaningful contact around the
world with newfound comrades (Rheingold 1993, 2000; Wellman and Gulia 1999a).
Although
early accounts focussed on the formation of online “virtual” communities, it
has become clear that most relationships formed in cyberspace continue in
physical space, leading to new forms of community characterized by a mixture of
online and offline interactions. Moreover, online interactions fill
communication gaps between face to face meetings. The Internet thus enhances
the tendency for many ties to be nonlocal, connected by cars, planes, phones,
and now computer networks. Although a developing phenomenon world‑wide,
nonlocal community is probably most prevalent in North America where people
move frequently and sometimes far‑away; where family, friends, former
neighbours, and workmates are separated by many miles; and where the many immigrants
keep contact with friends and relatives in their homelands.
Those
who see the Internet as playing an increasingly central role in everyday life
argue that it increases communication, offline as well as online. In this view,
the Internet not only afford opportunities to contact friends and kin at low
cost, it also enhances face‑to‑face and telephone communication as
network members: The
Internet can also increase civic involvement in voluntary organizations by
facilitating the flow of information between face‑to‑face meetings
and arranging these meetings themselves. The plethora of information available
on the web and the ease of using search engines and hyperlinks to find groups
fitting one’s interests enables newcomers to find, join, and get involved in
kindred organizations (Horan 2000).
By contrast, critics worry that life on the Internet can never be
meaningful or complete because it will lead people away from the full range of
in-person contact. Or, conceding half the debate, they worry that people will
get so engulfed in a simulacrum virtual reality, that they will lose contact
with “real life.” This latter side of the debate is Tönnies nouveau,
warning that meaningful contact will wither without the full bandwidth provided
by in-person, in-the flesh contact. The view that the Internet decreases
community offers several interrelated bases for its contention:
1.
The Internet may be diverting people from “true” community because online
interactions are inherently inferior to face‑to‑face and even phone
interactions. Some analysts have argued
that the comparatively low social presence of computer mediated communication
cannot by itself sustain strong ties because of the lack of physical and social
cues and immediate feedback (Stoll 1995). (Daft and Lengel 1986; Short, Williams and Christie 1976;
Kiesler and Sproull 1991; Hiltz and Turoff 1993; Latané and Bourgeois 1996).
2.
Skeptics question the quality as well as the narrowness of online community (Nissenbaum
1999). Eric Uslaner (2000b) argues that the
Internet fosters fragmented identities and communities that weaken shared
understanding and enforceable trust.
3. The Internet may compete for time with other
activities in an inelastic 24‑hour day, and can draw people's attention
away from their immediate physical environment. It can blur the home-work
boundary, straining family life. (Nie 2001; Anderson and Tracy 2001).
4. The Internet may be a stressor that depresses and
alienates people from interaction (Kraut, et al. 1998).
5. Although the Internet can foster global interactions,
it keeps people indoors, staring at their screens, and neglecting local
interactions at home and in the neighbourhood.
6. Online ties may be more homogeneous
in perspective. They often evolve around a specific interest such as soap
operas or BMW cars. This can narrow perspectives and access to new information.
C. Is the Internet Transforming Community?
Rather than increasing or destroying community,
perhaps the Internet can best as integrated into rhythms of daily life, with
life online viewed as an extension of offline activities. Thus, the Internet
provides an additional means of communication to telephone and face‑to‑face
contact, one that can be more convenient and affordable. This suggests that the
Internet’s effects on society will be evolutionary, like the telephone has
been, continuing and intensifying the interpersonal transformation from “door‑to‑door”
to individualized “place‑to‑place” and “person‑to‑person”
networks. Although face‑to‑face and telephone contact continue,
they are complemented by the Internet’s ease in connecting geographically
dispersed people and organizations bonded by shared interests.
Email continues to be the most
important type of Internet medium for sustaining community (Klement, Wellman
and Hampton 2002). There are multiple interpersonal reasons for using email
with community members:
1.
It is
almost as easy to send a message to 10 friends as it is to contact one.
2.
Group
aliases allow people to contact 100 or more friends by typing a single word.
3.
Email
discussion groups and real-time chat groups provide specialized audiences—and
some respondents—of the hundreds and thousands.
4.
Many
online ties are palpable, supportive relationships. The Internet is useful both
for maintaining strong ties of intimacy and weaker ties of acquaintanceship.
5.
Rather
than being exclusively online or in-person, many community ties are complex
dances of face-to-face encounters, scheduled meetings, two-person telephone
calls, emails to one person or several, and broader online discussions among
those sharing interests.
It may be that the Internet is more useful for maintaining existing ties than for creating new ones. Nor might the Internet lead to organizational and political participation, if users have no interest in such matters (Cohill and Kavanaugh 2000; Kavanaugh and Patterson 2001). Thus, if the Internet transforms community, then Internet use should add to offline interpersonal interaction, not affect organizational participation, and increase commitment to community. The level of Internet involvement will not be associated with either more or less offline activity.
D. The
Internet Increases and Transforms Community
Evidence about the Internet’s effect on
community was originally mixed. Most cross-sectional studies showed that those
online more engaged more in community (Katz 1997; Robinson, et al. 2000; Katz,
Rice and Aspden 2001; Haythornthwaite and Wellman 1998; Wellman et al. 2001).
By contrast, Nie’s (2001) study suggested that extensive online involvement
took people away from interaction with household and community members.
Moreover, the only true longitudinal study found that some “newbies” became
more depressed, alienated and isolated during the first six months of computer
use (Kraut, et al. 1998).
As
studies develop, it is becoming clear that the Internet is not destroying
community but is responding to, resonating with, and extending the types of community
that have already become prevalent in the developed Western world
(Haythornthwaite and Wellman 2001; Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002). The sheer
amount of time spent online is increasing, per capita as well as overall. For
example, where the average AOL user spent 31 minutes per day online in the
first quarter of 1997, in four years this had more than doubled to 64 minutes
online in the first quarter of 2001 (Odlyzko 2001). Nor does familiarity breed
interpersonal contempt: The more contact people have online, the greater the
impression they make (Liu 2001).
For
one thing, as the newbies studied by Kraut, et al. (2001) gained more
experience with the Internet, their depression and alienation disappeared, and
their social contact increased enough to have a positive impact on their
overall interactions with community members. A comparative analysis found that
social support obtained online helped people to deal with depression (LaRose,
Eastin and Gregg 2001). A large survey of National Geographic web-site
visitors, also found that the Internet increased community interaction
(Wellman, et al. 2001; Quan, et al. 2002). While face-to-face visits and phone
calls neither declined or increased with increased Internet use, it added to
it. Hence, the overall volume of contacts with friends and relatives increased.
However, another study does find that email use is displacing telephone use to
some extent (Dimmick, Gade and Rankin 2001). Perhaps there are differences in
the kinds of communication that take place on the Internet or by telephone or
face-to-face.
The
positive impact of the Internet on community ties is true for those living both
nearby and far away. The proportionate gain in contact is greatest for contact
with friends and relatives living at a distance (Wellman, et al. 2001; Hampton
and Wellman 2001), as one might expect from a system able to cross time zones
at a single bound and were there is no differentiation between short-distance
and long-distance messages. Yet contact remains highest with those living
nearby, both online and offline (Wellman, et al. 2001; Hampton and Wellman
2001). Cyberspace does not vanquish the importance of physical space. Indeed,
many email, short text, and chat messages are to set up face-to-face meetings
(Haythornthwaite and Wellman 1998; Ling and Yttri 2002).
II. Issues in the Impact of the Internet on Community
A. Are Online Relationships Narrowly
Specialized or Broadly Supportive?
Online groups are a
technologically-supported continuation of a long term shift to communities
organized by shared interests rather than by shared place (neighbourhood or
village) or shared ancestry (kinship group). Relationships in these virtual
communities can be quite narrow, existing mostly for information
processing.(Rheingold 2000; Sproull and Faraj 1995). Although the view is
limited, the focus can be important when efficiency and speed are needed, as
when a cluster of social network analysts quickly analyzed the network of those
who allegedly attacked New York City on Sept 11, 2001.
If the Internet were solely a means
of information exchange, then virtual communities played out over the Internet
would mostly contain only narrow, specialized relationships. In practice, those
who communicate online maintain a variety of links, encompassing information
exchange, companionship, emotional aid, arranging services, and providing a
sense of belonging (Hiltz, Johnson and Turoff, 1986; Walther, 1994; Walther,
Anderson and Park 1995; Klement, Wellman and Hampton 2002). Information is only one of many
social resources exchanged on the Internet. Despite the inability to reach out
and touch someone online, many Internet participants get help in electronic support
groups for social, physical and mental problems along with information about
treatments, practitioners and other resources. For example, physically-isolated
Muslim women in North America have found online support and information sharing
from each other (Bastani 2001b; Cullen 1995; Foderaro 1995; Hampton and Wellman
2001). As social beings, those who use the Internet seek not only information
but also companionship, social support and a sense of belonging. These are all
non-material resources that are often possible to provide from the comfort of
one's computer and often do nor require major investments of time, money, or
energy. (Furlong 1989; Hiltz, Johnson and Turoff 1986; Rice and Love 1987;
McCormick and McCormick 1992; Walther 1994; Rheingold 1993; Meyer 1989; Sproull
and Faraj 1995; Kraut et al. 1995; Rheingold 2000; Haythornthwaite and Wellman
2001; Miyata 2002; Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002).
B. In What Ways are the Many Weak Ties
on the Internet Useful?
Virtual
communities may resemble “real life” communities in the sense that support is
available, often in specialized relationships. However, Internet members are
distinctive in providing information, support, companionship and a sense of
belonging to persons they hardly know off-line or who are total strangers.
Studies of computer-supported cooperative work provide ample evidence of the
usefulness of acquiring new information from weak ties on the Internet
(Constant, Sproull and Kiesler 1997;Pickering and King 1995; Garton and Wellman
1995; Harasim and Winkelmans 1990; Carley and Wendt 1991; Bastani 2001b; Miyata
2002). For example, 58 percent of the messages on an organization's discussion
list (DL) came from strangers (Finholt and Sproull 1990; Kiesler and
Sproull 1988).
This willingness to communicate with
strangers online contrasts with in-person situations where bystanders are often
reluctant to intervene and help strangers (Latané and Darley 1976). Yet bystanders
are more apt to intervene when they are the only ones around (and most
reluctant when there are many others) and requests are read by solitary
individuals, alone at their screens. Even if the online request is to a
newsgroup or discussion group, and not by personal email, as far as the
recipient of the request knows, s/he may be the only one available who could
provide help. In chat groups and list serves, even when such support
is a small act such as mailing get-well cards or "cyber chicken
soup," such acts can cumulatively sustain a group. Each act is seen online
by the entire group and perpetuates a norm of inclusionary mutual
supportiveness in the organization or community (Rheingold 2000). This is similar to communal, real
life, acts of compassion (Wuthnow 1991).Yet online assistance will be observed
by the entire group and positively rewarded by its members (Kollock and Smith
1996). Moreover, it is easier to withdraw from problematic situations when they
are online — all one has to do is “exit” the Internet session — than it is to
withdraw from face-to-face interactions.
The lack of status or situational
cues can encourage contact between weak ties. Often, the only thing known about
others is their email address which may provide minimal or misleading information.
The relatively egalitarian nature of Internet contact can encourage responses
to requests. By contrast, the cues associated with in-person contact transmit
information about gender, age, race, ethnicity, life-style and socioeconomic
status, and clique membership (Culnan and Markus 1987; Garton and Wellman 1995;
Hiltz and Turoff 1993; Weisband, Schneider and Connolly 1995). Online
interaction can also generate a culture of its own, as when humorous stories
(or virus warnings) sweep the Net, coming repeatedly to participants.
C. Is There Reciprocity and Attachment
Online?
The problem of motivation for giving
support in a virtual community arises because many of the exchanges that take
place online are between persons who never (or rarely), meet in-person, have
only weak ties, and are not bound into densely-knit community structures that
could enforce norms of reciprocity. Some analysts have suggested that the
greater the social and physical distance between the support seeker and
provider (i.e., the weaker the tie), the less likely that reciprocity will take
place. This suggests that people may not be motivated to provide assistance,
information and support to physically and socially-distant others on the
Internet as they are less likely to be rewarded or receive support in return
(Constant, Sproull and Kiesler 1997).
Nevertheless, many Internet members
do reciprocate support, even to weak ties (Hiltz, Johnson and Turoff 1986;
Walther 1994). Constant, Sproull and Kiesler's (1997) study of information
sharing in an organization suggests two explanations for this reciprocity (see
also Constant, Kiesler and Sproull 1994). One is that the process of providing
support and information on the Internet is a means of expressing one's
identity, particularly if technical expertise or supportive behavior is perceived
as an integral part of one's self-identity. Helping others can increase
self-esteem, respect from others and status attainment.
Norms of generalized reciprocity and
organizational citizenship are another reason for why people help others online
(Constant, Sproull and Kiesler 1997). People who have a strong attachment to
the organization will be more likely to help others with organizational
problems. Such norms typically arise in a densely-knit community, but they
appear to be common among frequent contributors to distribution lists and
newsgroups. People having a strong attachment to an electronic group, will be
more likely to participate and provide assistance to others Kollock and Smith
1996).
Group attachment is intrinsically
tied to norms of generalized reciprocity and aiding mutual friends. People
often show respect for groups by helping both members they do not know and
members who have once helped them (Constant, Sproull and Kiesler 1997;
Rheingold 2000). Moreover, those who have contributed actively to the BMW car,
community sociology or social network discussion groups get their requests for
advice answered more quickly and more widely (personal observations). The
accumulation of small, individual acts of assistance can sustain a large community
because each act is seen by the entire group and help to perpetuate an image of
generalized reciprocity and mutual aid. People know that they may not receive
help from the person they helped last week, but from another network member
(Rheingold 1993; Barlow 1995; Lewis 1994). That is probably why people reply to
the entire group when answering an individual's question. providing assistance
to others when the group is large can be quite easy
D. Are Strong, Intimate Ties Possible
Online?
Even
if weak ties flourish in virtual communities, does the narrower bandwidth of
computer-mediated communication work against the maintenance of socially-close,
strong ties? When people chat, get information and find support on the
Internet, do they experience real community or just the inadequate simulacra
about which dystopians have warned?
Strong ties that are online have
many characteristics that are similar to strong offline ties. They encourage frequent,
companionable contact and are voluntary except in work
situations. One or two keystrokes are all that is necessary to begin replying,
facilitating reciprocal, mutual support of tie partners'
needs. Moreover, the placelessness of email contact aids long-term
contact, without the loss of the tie that so often accompanies geographical
mobility.
But if the relationships are
companionate and supportive, are they truly intimate and special enough to be
strong ties, and do they operate in multiple social contexts? Part of the fears
about the inability of the Internet to sustain strong ties is wrongly
specified. Enthusiasts and critics of virtual community sometimes parochially
vie relationships as being solely online. This fixation on the technology leads
analysts to ignore the abundant accounts of community ties operating both
online and off-line, with the Internet being just one of several ways to
communicate. Despite all the talk about virtual community transcending time and
space sui generis, much contact is between people who see each other in
person. As with the telephone and the fax, the lower social
presence of email can maintain strong ties between persons who originally met
face-to-face. E-mail exchanges intersect with in-person meetings, filling in
gaps and making arrangements for future get-togethers. Conversations started on
one medium continue on others.
The
Internet is rich enough to sustain strong ties (see the reviews in DiMaggio, et
al. 2001; Garton and Wellman 1995; Sproull and Kiesler 1991). Walther (1995) argues that online
relationships are socially close, suggesting that groups of people interacting
on the Internet become more personal and intimate over time (see also McGrath
and Hollingshead 1994). He points out that most research experiments analyze
social interactions within a limited time, missing the nuances of later
interactions and the potential for relationships to grow closer over time. He argues
that the medium does not prevent close relationships from growing but simply
slows the process. Relational development takes longer online than in
face-to-face interactions because communication is usually asynchronous (and
slower) and the available bandwidth offers less verbal and non-verbal information
per exchange. Walther's experiments comparing groups of undergraduates online
and in-person meetings suggest that over time, online interactions are as
sociable or intimate as in-person interactions. In other words, the Internet
does not preclude intimacy.
Although there are many anecdotes
about anti-social behavior online, such as confidence men betraying the
innocent, entrepreneurs “spamming” the Internet with unwanted advertisements,
online stalkers harassing Internet participants and scoundrels taking on
misleading roles (e.g., “Cybergal” 1995). The most widely-reported stories are
about men posing online as women and seducing other women (e.g. Slouka 1995),
but the accounts suggest that these are probably rare incidents. Moreover,
masquerading can have a playful, creative aspect allowing people to try on
different roles: Such systems as the real-time IRC (Reid 1991; Bechar-Israeli
1995; Danet, Ruedenberg and Rosenbaum-Tamari 1998; Danet 2001) and the asynchronous
EIES (Hiltz and Turoff 1993) encourage role-playing by permitting participants
to communicate by nicknames.
A possibly greater threat than to
community relationships is the ease by which relationships are disrupted. The
narrower bandwidth of communication facilitates the misinterpretation of
remarks and the asynchronous nature of most conversations hinders the immediate
repair of damages.
Although immersive role-playing
Internet environments at times resemble village-like structures in the ways
they capture some participants' attention (Reid 1998; DuVal Smith 1998; Kim
2002), people rarely spend their full time in these environments. The tendency
of the Internet is to foster participation in multiple, partial communities.
People often subscribe to multiple discussion lists and newsgroups. They can
easily send out messages to personal lists of their own making, perhaps keeping
different lists for different kinds of conversations. Moreover, they can vary
in their involvements in different communities, participating actively in some,
occasionally in others, and being silent “lurkers” in still others.
Such communities develop new
connections easily. The Internet makes it easy to ask distant acquaintances and
strangers for advice and information via email (distribution lists, newsgroups,
etc.). When strong ties are unable to provide information, weak ties are easily
reachable. Hence, computer-supported solutions are developing for working
through trusted interpersonal relationships to identify, locate, and receive
information within and between communities and organizations (Contractor, Zink
and Chan 1998; Sack 2000; Nardi, Whittaker and Schwartz 2001; Jones, Ravid and
Rafaeli 2000; Heath, Knoblauch and Luff 2000; Uslaner 2000a, 2000b).
The Internet encourages the
expansion of community networks. Information may come unsolicited through
discussion groups, newsgroups and forwarded messages from friends who “thought
you might like to know about this.” Friends forward communications to third
parties, and in so doing, they provide indirect contact between
previously-disconnected people who can then make direct contact. Newsgroups and
discussion groups provide permeable, shifting sets of participants, with more
intense relationships continued by private email. The resulting relaxation of
constraints on the size and proximity of one's “communication audience” on the
Internet can increase the diversity of people encountered (Lea and Spears
1995).
Characteristics
of the Internet afford diversity as well as homogeneity, especially as the
population of users becomes more socially diverse. The Internet's relative lack of social richness can
foster contact with more diverse others. The lower
social presence of email and chat – as compared with face-to-face encounters or
telephone conversations -- makes it easier to contact strangers. There is less
concern about rude intrusion or interpersonal risk (Stoll 1995). The lack of social and physical
cues online makes it difficult to find out if another Internet member has
similar social characteristics or attractive physical characteristics (Sproull
and Kiesler 1986), and Internet norms discourage asking outright if someone is
high or low status, handsome or ugly. Similarities in interests are
emphasized; differences in physical attributes or social characteristics are
not seen or emphasized.
The Internet's lack of in-person involvement can give participants more control
over the timing and content of their self-disclosures (Walther 1995). This
allows relationships to develop on the basis of shared interests rather than be
stunted at the onset by differences in social status (Hiltz and Turoff 1993;
Coate 1994; Weisband, Schneider and Connolly 1995). These
affordances of the Internet can foster community ties with people who have more
diverse social characteristics than might normally be encountered in person Such specialized communities, based
on shared interests, can foster cognitive homogeneity. The focus on shared interests
rather than on similar characteristics can be empowering for otherwise
lower-status and disenfranchised groups, especially when their residential and
occupational segregation minimizes contact with others (Tigges 1998; Pinkett
2001). The homogeneous interests of virtual community
participants can foster high levels of empathetic understanding and mutual
support (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954; Verbrugge 1977; Feld 1982; Marsden 1983).
Hence computer mediated communication can help people to expand their stockpile
of community members that can provide information, instrumental aid and
emotional support (Preece 2000; Haythornthwaite, Wellman and Mantei 1995). For
example, more than half of the email messages in one organization were from
unknown people, different buildings, or people external to the work group or
the chain of command (Finholt and Sproull 1990; Sproull and Kiesler 1991).
F. The Continuing Coexistence of Space
with Cyberspace
Physical
space and cyber space interpenetrate as people actively surf their networks
online and offline. When someone calls a telephone that is hardwired into the
telephone network, the phone rings at the place, no matter which person
is being called. Indeed, many place-to-place ties have connected households
as much as individuals. Despite the proliferation of cyberspace, in-person
contact is still – and will continue to be – the preferred means of
communication to the extent feasible (Casey 1998; Orum and Chen 2002). Cyberspace complements physical place
because is the medium by which people arrange things and fill in the gaps
between meetings. It also presents options: People will vigorously communicate
with whom they want to online in preference to dealing with irrelevant
neighbours. Rather than being exclusively online or in-person, many
relationships are complex dances of face-to-face encounters, scheduled
meetings, two-person telephone calls, emails to one or more persons, and online
discussions among those sharing interests.
Many characteristics of the Internet
reinforce glocalized, place-to-place connectivity, combining elements of both
home-based little boxes and networked individualism. Although the
Internet connects globally, it often functions lumpily: Messages are not
dispersed evenly around the world but are disproportionately exchanged with a
few geographical areas, certain types of people, or people in the same social
networks (including “friends of friends”). Having global access does not mean
having global connectivity. The Internet both provides a ramp onto the global
information highway and strengthens local links within neighbourhoods and
households. For all its
global access, the Internet reinforces stay-at-homes. Although an Internet
account is usually for a person and not for a place, Internet communications
are usually sent and received from a fixed place: home or office. The wired,
at-home base of many personal computers affords household-based connectivity.
The use of always-on, 24x7 Internet connectivity increases confidence that
people will be available to read messages or agree to an instant chat. Indeed,
like the mobile phone and instant messaging, it may create false expectations
that someone is always accessible and always mobilizable.
Glocalization occurs, both because
the Internet makes it easy to contact many neighbours, and because fixed, wired
Internet connections tether users to home and office desks. Civic involvement
combines online, face-to-face, phone and written means of communicating and
organizing (Blanchard and Horan 2000; Wellman, et al. 2001). People usually
have a good idea of the sociophysical places in which the people they know are
reading their messages. If they send messages to their mothers, they must
expect that others at home will also read them. Digital communities and cities
are developing, explicitly designed to wire residents to each other as well as
to the outside world (Schuler 1996; Malina and Jankowski 1998; Hampton and
Wellman 1999; Ishida 2001, Ishida and Isbister 1999; Ishida and Tanabe 2002;
Loader, Hague and Brooks 2000; Shaw 2001).
The Internet can intensify
neighbouring (Resnick 1999). At work or at home, many emails are local and
refer to local arrangements. For example, 57 percent of the email
messages received by computer-intensive students in my Berkeley graduate course
came from within the city of Berkeley, with another 15 percent coming from
elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay area (Wellman 1999a). The visiting
Norwegian students in the course received many long-distance messages, but
almost all were from Norway – their neighbourhoods had followed them.
To take other examples, residents of
a Toronto wired suburb on a high speed network neighbour more actively than
others in the suburb (Hampton and Wellman 2000, 2002a; Hampton 2001; Pinkett
2001). These wired “Netville” residents know twenty-five neighbours; the
unwired know eight. Their ties range farther through the neighbourhood instead
of just clustering on the same block. Their community network was much more
densely-knit than the non-wired. Their networks became quickly mobilized for
collective action in dealing with burglars, real estate developer, and their
Internet service provider (Hampton 2002).
Netville residents use their computers and the Internet heavily. Family members help each other to use computers, share online discoveries, and replace time spent watching television with net surfing. One family have a Saturday evening ritual of gathering around the computer with the family and a bowl of popcorn. Parents rarely complain that the time their children and spouse spend online took away from family activities. (Wellman and Hampton 1999, Hampton and Wellman 1999, 2000; Hampton 2001). The Homenet study in Pittsburgh and the Camfield study in Boston found that in some instances, teenagers have increased power as computer gurus to whom other household members turn for help (Kiesler, et al. 2000; Pinkett 2001).
The Internet increases long-distance
involvement as well as local involvement. When Netville residents receive
high-speed connections to the Internet, their social contact and supportive exchanges
with friends and relatives living more than 50 kilometers away increases
substantially. The National Geographic web survey also shows that
Internet use adds on to—rather than detracts from—in-person and telephone
contact with friends and relatives, near-by as well as far-away (Wellman, et
al. 2001). Indeed, it may provide a vehicle for reversing the post-1960s
decline in American social and organizational involvement (Bellah, et al. 1996;
Wuthnow 1998; Putnam 2000).
III. The
Rise of Networked Individualism as A Basis for Community
A. From
Place-To-Place to Person-To-Person Communities
The proliferation of
computer-supported social networks is facilitating changes that have been
developing for decades in the ways that people contact, interact, and obtain
resources with each other. This section discusses how communities – and
societies – have been changing towards “networked individualism,” or, if
you like, “individualized networking”.
The structure and composition of
community networks affect people’s control over their lives, and people’s
structural positions in community networks affect the kinds of resources to
which they have access. We have been experiencing a
transition from
place-based inter-household ties to individualized person‑to‑person
interactions and specialized interactions. This turn towards communities based
on networked individualism started well before the development of cyberspace
(Wellman and Wetherell 1996; Wellman 1999a).
The
current development of person-to-person connectivity has been afforded both by
social changes – such as liberalized divorce laws – and technological changes –
such as the proliferation of expressways and affordable air transportation
(Wellman 2000a; Galston 1999). Technologically, it has been influenced more by innovations in
communication than in transportation. The personalization, wireless
portability and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked
individualism as the basis of community. They are already way stations on the move to
person-to-person community. Because connections are to people
and not to places, the technology affords shifting of work and community ties
from linking people-in-places to linking people at any place. Computer-supported
communication will be everywhere, but it will be situated nowhere.
It is I‑alone that is reachable wherever I am: at a house, hotel, office,
highway or shopping centre. The person has become the portal (Wellman 2000a).
The shift to a personalized,
wireless world facilitates personal communities that supply support,
sociability, information, and a sense of belonging separately to each
individual. It is the individual, and neither the household nor the group, that
is the primary unit of connectivity. Just as 24x7 Internet computing means the
high availability of people in specific places, the proliferation of mobile
phones and wireless computing increasingly means the even higher availability
of people without regard to place. From the point of view of people using
mobile phones, their supportive convoys travel with them ethereally (Katz 1999;
Ling and Ytrri 2002; Katz and Aakus 2001). They can link what they are
physically doing at the moment to their far-flung community. Yet, people cannot
assume that all community members will provide all kinds of help because
person-to-person connectivity moves responsibility for well-being from the
household and network to the two-person dyad.
As high bandwidth wireless computing
becomes prevalent, communicating computers are breaking their tethers and
become placeless. There are already leading-edge indicators of this trend.
Mobile phones already afford a fundamental liberation from place, and they soon
will be joined by wireless computers and personalized software. Internet cafés
in malls or main streets allow travellers to keep connected, road warriors use
global phone/Internet access networks to connect from hotels or businesses they
are visiting, mobile phones are developing Internet capability, and a well-located
few have wireless modems on their laptop computers. As satellite links develop
and technical standards for wireless communications evolve globally, the same
wireless phone-computer will be able to reach the Internet as easily in Bora
Bora as in Silicon Valley.
Although the switch from
door-to-door to place-to-place community has enabled communities of choice that
were less constrained by distance, place-to-place community has preserved some
sense of social context. The shift from place-to-place to person-to-person
community reduces this contextual sense. Physical surroundings must be
described, rather than assumed because people have uncertain knowledge about
the immediate whereabouts and social contexts of their mobile network members.
Often, the sociophysical context is ignored, as when people talk loudly on
their mobile phones in public. They are not being anti-social: the very fact of
their conversation means they are socially connected. Rather, their awareness
and behavior are in private cyberspace even though their bodies are in public
space.
The technological development of
computer-communications networks and the societal flourishing of social
networks are now affording the rise of networked individualism in a positive
feedback loop. Just as the flexibility of less-bounded, spatially dispersed,
social networks creates demand for collaborative communication and information
sharing, the rapid development of computer-communications networks nourishes
societal transitions from little boxes to social networks (Castells 1996,
2000). Where high
speed place-to-place communication supports the dispersal and fragmentation of
organizations and community, high speed person-to-person communication supports
the dispersal and role-fragmentation of workgroups and households. Each person
is a switchboard, between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as
individuals rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and
household. Individuals switch rapidly between their social networks. Each person
separately operates his networks to obtain information, collaboration, orders,
support, sociability, and a sense of belonging.
B. The Lessened Role of the Household
as a Basic Unit of Community
Where high speed place-to-place
communication supports the dispersal and fragmentation of community, high speed
person-to-person communication goes one step further and supports the dispersal
and role-fragmentation of households. As community moves out of the household
and onto the mobile phone and the modem, there is scope for yet another
renegotiation of marital relations. Does the switch to person-to-person
connectivity mean that even stably-married husbands and wives will be in
separate communities? Women have set the rules of the community game in
place-to-place relationships and borne the burden of community keeping. If
person-to-person community means that it is every person for him/herself, then
there may be a return to the gender-segregated marital lives that Elizabeth
Bott documented over a generation ago in England (1957), with the additional
possibility that men’s communities will be smaller than networking-savvy women
(Wright 1989; Moore 1990; Wellman 1992a, Bruckner and Knaup 1993). The shift in
the western world to single-adult households – both adults working in married
households, and serial marriage -- means that married couples are no longer the
demographic heartbeat of America, augmenting households with single-gendered
adults.
"Mobile-ization"
is a term I have coined to summarize how the development of globalization,
ubiquity, portability, and "always connectivity" (Tom Grey's term, personal
communication, July 10 2001) may affect community and society. Until now,
mobile phones have gone further than personal computers in affording
person-to-person contact. At its most fully developed, mobile-ization assumes
that callers and receivers are always available, no matter where they may be.
It suits and reinforces mobile lifestyles and physically dispersed relationships.
It affords liberation from both place and group. Yet, the fact that people can
be reached anytime, anywhere comes at a price. They will need the capability to
manage these connections so that they may efficiently do their jobs without
being overcome by constant communications
As mobile phones proliferate, the norms of this inherently person-to-person system foster the intrusion of involving private behaviour into public space (Townsend 2000; see also Lofland 1998). Such transgressions are increasing and upsetting near-by involuntary listeners (Taylor 2000: A21). It is not just the loud noise. Listening through earphones to music on tape and disc players is another example of the personalization of public space. Listeners often appear to be oblivious to passers-by, often walking into them, and unaware (and apparently uncaring) about the unwanted sounds escaping from their earphones.
Mobile phone users are communicating, but their communication is often disassociated with the physical place which they are in. They ignore the public aspects of their behaviour. Their failure to relate simultaneously to both cyber place and physical place is what bothers others. Their awareness and behaviour is totally in private cyberspace even though their bodies are in public space.
D. Specialized Roles and Communities
Computer mediated communication accelerates the ways in which people operate at the centres of partial, personal communities, switching rapidly and frequently between groups of ties. People have an enhanced ability to move between relationships. At the same time, their more individualistic behaviour means the weakening of the solidarity that comes from being in densely-knit, loosely-bounded groups.
Many
computer supported social networks are a continuation of the long term shift to
communities and work groups that are organized by shared interests rather than
by shared locality. The sparse, unbounded nature of the Internet means that
people unhappy with one interaction can maneuver between different
computer-supported discussion groups and private e-relationships. Although
computer supported social networks do sustain broadly multiplex relationships,
they are particularly suited for fostering specialized relationships. The
Internet encourages specialized relationships because it supports a market
approach to finding social resources through online relationships. With more
ease than in almost all situations, people can surf Internet email, newsgroups
and search the Web for resources, with reduced search and travel time
(Hargittai 2001). Participants can browse through specialized chat groups and
discussion lists on the Internet before deciding to join a discussion
(Bechar-Israeli 1995). Relationships in these milieus are often narrowly
defined, although the inclusion of email addresses in most messages provides
the basis for more multiplex relationships to develop (Bastani 2001b).
Personalization need not mean
individual isolation. Collaborative filtering is developing, where people
contribute to evaluations of books, restaurants, politicians, and movies
(Schiesel 2000). People can use their filters and personal agents to find
like-minded others and form communities of shared interest. “If you combine virtual community, collaborative
filtering, and web‑to‑mobile phone, you get a scenario in which you
always know who in your physical vicinity at the moment shares certain
affinities and willingness to be contacted” (Howard Rheingold, personal email,
January 11 2000; see also Rheingold 1993, 2000).
The
rapid growth of the Internet has led to increased interest in virtual
community, communities that are sustained almost entirely through
telecommunications and computer-mediated communication. Proliferating in the 1990s,
such computer-supported virtual communities have existed since the mid-1970s
and have been widespread among scientists since the mid-1980s (Cerf 1993;
Sproull and Kiesler 1991; Hiltz and Turoff 1993; Wellman, et al. 1996b).
There
is vigorous public debate about the healthiness of such virtual communities.
Are they, in fact, communities, supplying true companionship, meaningful
support, and solid senses of belonging? Recent reviews of relevant research
show that virtual communities sustain a broad many types of community
interactions, provide a range of social support to community members, and are
governed by persistent norms of reciprocity and social control. This is not
only true for private forms of interpersonal community (Wellman and Gulia
1999a), but for public, civic engagement (Jankowski and Van Selm 2000).
The
ties people develop and maintain in cyberspace are much like most of their
“real life” community ties: intermittent, specialized and varying in strength
(Smith and Kollock 1999; Rheingold 2000). Even in “real life,” people must maintain
differentiated portfolios of ties to obtain a variety of resources. But in
virtual communities, the market metaphor of shopping around for support in specialized
ties is even more exaggerated than in real life because the architecture of computer
networks promotes market-like situations. For example, decisions about which
newsgroups and discussion groups to get involved in can be made from topical
menus that list available choices, while requests for help can be broadcast to
a wide audience from the comfort of one's home rather than having to ask people
one-by-one. Thus while online ties may be specialized, the aggregate sets of
ties in virtual communities are apt to provide a wide range of support.
The
architecture of the Internet may encourage significant alterations in the size,
composition and structure of communities. The Internet's architecture supports
the proliferation of community ties, especially non-intimate ties. Discussion
groups and newsgroups routinely involve hundreds of members while people easily
send hasty notes or long letters to many friends and acquaintances. The
distance-free cost structure of the Internet transcends spatial limits even
more than the telephone, the car or the airplane because the asynchronous
nature of Internet allows people to communicate over different time zones. This
could allow latent ties to stay in more active contact until the participants
have an opportunity to meet in-person. By supporting such online contact, the
Internet may foster in-person meetings between persons who might otherwise
forget each other.
With
regard to the structure of communities, the Internet is nourishing two
contradictory phenomena. Specialized newsgroups, discussion groups, and the
like foster multiple memberships in partial communities. Yet the ease of group
response and forwarding fosters the folding-in of formerly separate Internet
participants into more all-encompassing communities.
Lives
may become even more home-centred, if telework proliferates (Salaff, et al.
2000; Wellman, et al. 1996; Michelson, Linden and Wikstrom 1999). Just as was
prevalent before the Industrial Revolution, home and workplace are being
integrated for teleworkers, although gender roles have not been renegotiated. The
domestic environment of teleworkers is becoming a vital home base for neo-Silas
Marners sitting in front of their computer screens. Nests are becoming well
feathered, and teleworkers will be well situated to provide the eyes on the
street that are the foundation of neighbouring (Jacobs 1961). However, they may
well be lonely. Teleworkers socialize with far fewer people than other workers:
Where average Canadian employees spend 50 percent of their time awake with
others, teleworkers spend only 16 percent (Harvey and Taylor 2000).
Yet
virtual communities provide possibilities for reversing the trend to less
contact with community members because it is so easy to connect online with
large numbers of people. For example, I have a personal “friends” list of eighty
persons to whom I frequently sends jokes, deep thoughts and reports about life
experiences. Such communication typically stimulates ten to twenty direct
replies, plus similar messages sent out by others to their online friends.
Communities such as online discussion groups usefully stimulate communication
in another way. Because all participants can read all messages — just as in a
just as when a group talks in a café, open office, or pub — groups of people
can talk to each other casually and get to know the friends of their friends.
Urbanist William Mitchell proclaims, “The Internet is my café,” (Mitchell 1995,
p.7).
Thus
even as the Internet is accelerating the trend to moving community interaction
out of physical public spaces, it is also integrating society. The Internet’s
architecture supports both weak and strong ties that cut across social milieus,
be they interest groups, localities, organizations or nations. As a result,
cyberlinks between people become social links between groups that otherwise would
be socially and physically dispersed (Durkheim 1893; Breiger 1974; Wellman
1988).
B. How
Does Virtual Community Affect “Real-Life”
Community?
Along with the excitement about the
Internet, there are widespread fears that high involvement in virtual community
will move people away from involvement in “real-life” communities, which are
sustained by face-to-face, telephone and postal contact (e.g., Nie 2001).
Instead of the fear discussed above that the Internet is too weak to destroy
community, this is a fear that the compelling lure of the Internet,
cyberaddiction, will overwhelm face-to-face community. Such fears are misstated
in many ways.
1.
They treat community as a zero-sum game, assuming that if people spend more
time interacting online, they well spend less time interacting in “real life” instead
of less time doing something less social.
2.
The most common Internet addiction scale merely adapts the gambling addiction
scale, substituting “internet” for gambling” in its questions (Greenfield 1999).
It does not consider the many pro-social aspects of interaction online or its
utility for the marginal or the disabled.
3.
Accounts of addiction demonstrate the strength and importance of online
ties, and not their weakness. Critics who disparage the authenticity of such
strong, online ties are being unwarrantedly and unempirically snobbish in
disregarding the seriousness with which Internet participants take their relationships.
4. The excitement about the implications
of email for community implicitly sets up a false comparison between
email-based virtual communities and face-to-face based real-life communities.
The real comparison should not be with the community “gold standard” of
supportive, sociable villagers (who are not too nosy), but with the reality of
at-home television nights and physically dispersed friends and relatives
(Wellman 1999a).
5.
People do not neatly divide their worlds into two discrete sets: community
members seen in-person and people contacted online. Many community ties connect
off-line as well as online.
6. Although many online relationships
remain specialized, the inclusion of email addresses in messages between
strangers provides the basis for more multiplex relationships to develop between
participants (Rheingold 1993; King 1994; Hiltz and Turoff 1993).
7.
The broadening of narrowly-defined relationships to broadly-based, multiplex
ones can involve the conversion of relationships that only operate online to
ones that include in-person and telephonic encounters. Just as community ties
that began face-to-face can be sustained through email, online ties can be reinforced
and broadened through face-to-face meetings. Without social and physical cues,
people can meet and get to know each other on the Internet and then decide whether
to take the relationship into a broader realm.
1.
As physical space continues to be important in its own right and as a
complement to cyberspace, cyberspace is developing as its own milieu for
interaction as well as a complement to physical space. As computing power is
increasingly used to prioritize and enhance interactions, the power of
person-to-person communication systems is poised to increase, for better or
worse. Although physical place continues to be important, cyber space has
become cyber place, affecting the ways in which people find and maintain
community:
2.
In the short term, it has made the household more important, as a base
from which to operate one’s computer-supported social network. This can lead to
a rise in neighbouring, as home-based people take more interest in their
immediate surroundings and use the Internet to neighbour without physical
intrusion and to arrange visits (Hampton and Wellman 1999).
3. Jointly with the mobile phone, it has
emphasized the ascendancy of person-to-person community, contributing (along
with other factors) to the de-emphasis of domestic relations.
4. It has
emphasized individual autonomy and agency. Each person is the operator of
his/her personal community network (see also Wellman 1999a).
5. It has afforded
greater involvement in communities of shared interest. Such communities have
probably become more spatially dispersed.
6. It has afforded
greater connectivity between communities. The ease of communication to a large
number of people facilitates ties that cut across group boundaries.
7. Online relationships and online communities
have developed their own strength and dynamics. Participants in online groups
have strong interpersonal feelings of belonging, being wanted, obtaining
important resources, and having a shared identity. They are in true cyberplaces,
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