From Here to Community - Industry Trend or Event - Column

Health Management Technology, Jan, 2001 by Robin Blair

One of the hazards of working in publishing is that I seem to do more reading at work and less reading for pleasure. Most notably, I was late getting to Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam of Harvard University.

Putnam's heralded social commentary of 2000 details the erosion of American civic and community involvement over the past three decades. While the first two-thirds of the 20th century witnessed Americans' extensive involvement in their neighborhoods and civic organizations, Putnam offers an impressive collection of data to prove that baby boomers, Gen Xers and their offspring contribute to the national decline. Part of the reason, Putnam asserts, is the rise of electronic entertainment, including the Internet.

Putnam isn't the first and won't be the last to hold the rise of technology--especially individual use of technology--partially responsible for a decline in community involvement. Does it play out?

Five years ago, Dr. James E. Katz (Rutgers University) and Dr. Philip Aspden (Center for Research on the Information Society) conducted research to explore several aspects of the Internet. One was its influence on existing societal infrastructures, and another was its role in creating new modes of communication and interaction. Katz and Aspden found no support for the premise that Internet activity results in or contributes to a decline in community participation. In fact, some of the people they interviewed reported more involvement in social activities than non-Internet users surveyed.

Surprising, the researchers found that in both arenas--community involvement and social communications--heavy Internet users had higher levels of participation than non-users. Of course, they also found that Internet users socialized online, with 70 percent reporting four or more Internet friendships, and 60 percent of that group reporting having met in person at least one Internet friend.

Last year, sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman released the results of a three-year study of community involvement and social interaction in "Netville," a pseudonym for a Toronto community that was one of the world's first neighborhoods equipped with broadband technology offering more than 10 times the speed of cable modem or DSL.

Hampton and Wellman found that the wired residents recognized three times as many neighbors, and talked with twice as many, as non-wired residents. They also made more phone calls to local neighbors--five times as many--than non-wired residents.

In addition, the researchers found that e-mail availability equated with access in the extended neighborhood. Wired residents knew neighbors living throughout the suburb, not just in their immediate neighborhood, while the non-wired residents didn't. Neighborhood e-mails lists helped residents organize around political action, purchasing coalitions and a local teachers' strike; they also helped residents plan neighborhood parties and barbecues.

Is that the face of a technological demon, the implement of impending community destruction?

It would be easy for a non-researching non-sociologist to speculate that those who readily communicate with neighbors and community members view the Internet as an additional communication vehicle; that those who normally participate in civic activity view the Internet as one more road downtown; that those who are fast to make friends simply make more online.

But I would never be so presumptuous.