Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism

Barry Wellman
Pp. 10-25 in Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches, edited by Mokato Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar and Toru Ishida. Berlin: Springer, 2002.

                                                 
                                                                                             Abstract

Much thinking about digital cities is in terms of community groups. Yet, the world is composed of social networks and not of groups. This paper traces how communities have changed from densely-knit "Little Boxes" (densely-knit, linking people door-to-door) to "Glocalized" networks (sparsely-knit but with clusters, linking households both locally and globally) to "Networked Individualism" (sparsely-knit, linking individuals with little regard to space). The transformation affects design considerations for computer systems that would support digital cities.