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• One transition
  was the nineteenth/twentieth century move from door-to-door to place-to-place
  community relationships. This transition was driven by revolutionary developments
  in both transportation and communication. It was a move away from a solidary
  group in a single locale to contact between people in different places and
  multiple social networks. Households became important centres for networking;
  neighbourhoods became less important.
• Another transition
  has already started: The shift away from place-based inter-household ties
  to individualized person-to-person interactions and specialized role-to-role
  interactions.

Communities were
bounded, so that most relationships happened within their gates rather than
across them.

Living
in networks has profound implications for the nature of place-to-place communities
as compared with door-to-door communities:



• The ability
  to connect with multiple social milieus, with limited involvement in each
  milieu.
• The decreased
  control over inhabitants' behaviour that each milieu has.
• The decreased
  commitment of each milieu to its inhabitants' well-being.
• People must
  actively maintain their sparsely-knit ties and fragmented networks. By contrast,
  it is easier for people in groups 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.
• The ability
  to re-establish relationships quickly with friends and relatives whom one
  has not seen in months or even years.
• A lowered proportion
  of interactions based on "ascriptive" characteristics people are born with--such
  as age, gender, race, and social class--and increased proportion based on
  "achieved" characteristics adopted through the life course -- such as lifestyles,
  shared norms, and voluntary interests.
• Fostering "cross-cutting"
  ties that link and integrate social milieus, instead of such groups being
  isolated and tightly-bounded.
• Increased choices
  in milieus in which to get involved.
• Reduced sense
  of palpable group memberships that provide a sense of belonging.
• Reduced identity
  and pressures of belonging to groups.
• Increased opportunity,
  contingency, globalization, and uncertainty through participation in social
  networks.
• Increased emphasis
  on structural position in different networks--such as brokerage ties that
  connect multiple networks--and decreased emphasis on group membership. Active
  networking is more important than going along with the group.

Community networks now contain high proportions of people who
enjoy each other and low proportions of people who are forced to interact with
each other because they are juxtaposed in the same neighbourhood, kinship group,
organization, or workplace.


• It is almost
  as easy to send a message to 10 friends as it is to contact one.
• Group aliases
  allow people to contact 100 or more friends by typing a single word.
• Email discussion
  groups and real-time chat groups provide specialized audiences--and some respondents--of
  the hundreds and thousands.
• Many online
  ties are palpable, supportive relationships. The Internet is useful both for
  maintaining strong ties of intimacy and weaker ties of acquaintanceship.
• 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.

Can true community be found
online--in whole or in part--as well as in homes, on the phone, in the mall,
or on street corners? When I circulated a draft of my argument online, political
scientist Robert Putnam responded:

I think you're
a wild-eyed optimist to think that "person-to-person" networks are "just as
good as, if not better than" old-fashioned door-to-door (or rather faces-to-faces)
networks. But regardless of the differences between us in temperament, you surely
cannot think that the two sorts of networks are "essentially identical".

Low levels
of communication and electrical infrastructure, marked geographical variations
in what infrastructure does exist and uneven distributions of wealth mean that
any kind of telephone connection is currently rare in large areas of the impoverished
"fourth world". Four out of five people in the world do not have access to a
wired phone; nine out of ten do not have access to a wireless device (Khanna
2001). Telephone density is less than two lines per 1,000 persons in Africa
and 48 per 1,000 in Asia as compared to 520 per 1,000 in high-income countries
(Marcelle 1998: Darkwa and Mazibulo 2000). These "switched-off region[s] of
the world" are in a state of "technological apartheid at the dawn of the Information
Age" (Castells 1998: 93-94).

The good news
is that the cost of computing is becoming so low that in the developed world,
the digital social class divide should get smaller just as the digital gender
gap has. Even in the less-developed world, the growth of wireless computing
has made affluent residents less dependent on the national communications infrastructure.
The bad news is that schools do not formally teach networking skills.

Such specialized
communities, based on shared interests, can foster cognitive homogeneity. Despite
the Internet's potential to connect diverse cultures and ideas, people are drawn
to online communities that link them with others sharing common interests or
concerns. They may be more diversified than "real life" community in their gender,
ethnicity and socioeconomic status, but they still communicate about only a
limited set of topics and ideas.

Where person-to-person
community is individualizing, role-to-role community deconstructs a holistic
individual identity. A person becomes only the sum of her roles, and there is
the danger of alienation. The compartmentalization of personal life--within
the household and within the community--may create an insecure milieu where
no one fully knows anyone

Although physical
place continues to be important, cyber space has become cyber place, affecting
the ways in which people find and maintain community.



• 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).
• Jointly with
  the mobile phone, it is emphasizing the ascendancy of person-to-person community,
  contributing (along with other factors) to the de-emphasis of domestic relations.
• It has emphasized
  individual autonomy and agency. Each person is the operator of his/her personal
  community network (see also Wellman 1999a).
• It has afforded
  greater involvement in communities of shared interest. Such communities have
  probably become more spatially dispersed.
• It has afforded
  greater connectivity between communities. The ease of communication to a large
  number of people facilitates ties that cut across group boundaries.
• 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 truly
  in cyberplaces, and not just cyberspaces (Rheingold 1993, 2000; Wellman and
  Gulia 1999).
• Often, the cyberspace-physical
  space comparison is a false dichotomy. Many ties operate in both cyberspace
  and physical space, used whatever means of communication is convenient and
  appropriate at the moment.
• It has increased
  the importance of network capital in the fund of desirable resources, along
  with financial capital, human capital and cultural capital. Such network capital
  is variegated. It consists of knowing how to maintain a networked computer,
  search for information on the Internet and use the knowledge gained, create
  and sustain online relationships, and use these relationships to obtain needed
  resources, including indirect links to friends of friends.

Community has never been lost. Yet since the Industrial Revolution, most
people have believed that large-scale technological and social changes had destroyed
community in the developed world and were well on their way to killing it in developing
countries. Policymakers and pundits echoed and reinforced this belief, and until a
generation ago, most social scientists agreed with them.

Wherever they have looked, researchers have found thriving communities.
This is so well documented that there is no longer any scholarly need to demonstrate that
community ties exist everywhere, although the alarmed public, politicians and pundits need
to be constantly reassured and re-educated. But there is a pressing 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.

Ambivalence about the consequences of large-scale changes has continued
through the twentieth century, with scholars and pundits asking if things have, in fact,
fallen apart. Unfortunately, the fundamental concerns of the Community Question have
become confounded in many analyses with narrower issue

a. Interpersonal networks that provide sociability, social support and
social capital to their members;

b. Residence in a common locality, such as a village or neighborhood;

c. Solidary sentiments and activities (see Hillery 1955).

The developing body of research has shown that communities while may have changed in
response to the pressures, opportunities and constraints of large-scale forces, they have
not withered away.

There are two ways to look at community networks (or at any social networks, for that
matter): as whole networks or as personal communities.

3. Communities Have Moved Out of Neighborhoods to be Dispersed
Networks that Continue to be Supportive and Sociable.

2. People are Not Wrapped Up in Traditional Densely-Knit,
Tightly-Bounded Communities But are Manuevering in Sparsely-Knit, Loosely-Bounded,
Frequently-Changing Networks.

In reality, personal communities are usually sparsely knit and loosely bounded

The whole neighborhood overflowed into the street from nearby houses,
workshops, shops and taverns. Around every inhabitant a quartier took on its shape,
made up of daily contacts and changing reputations. Individuals worked round the corner
from where they lived. (Roche 1981, p. 246)

Although the men generally went out to enjoy themselves, they also used these public
communities to organize politically, to accomplish collective tasks, and to deal with
larger organizations. In colonial New England, "neighbors assumed not only the right
but the duty to supervise one another's lives" (Wall 1990).
This public community was largely a man's game. A woman who went alone to a Parisian wine
shop risked being mistaken for a prostitute (Garrioch 1986). 

Community has moved inside now, into private homes. The separation of
work from residential localities means that co-workers commute from different
neighborhoods and no longer come home from work in solidary sociable groups. 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. Thus husbands
and wives are now apt to be at home when both are available to each other. They stay home
too, for they are in no mood to go out and socialize after their weary trip 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.

5. Communities have become Domesticated and Feminized

Home is now the base for relationships that are more voluntary and selective than the
public communities of the past. Despite the importance of neighborhood ties portrayed in
Lee and Campbell’s and Espinoza’s chapter, only a minority of community ties in
the Western world operates in the public contexts of the neighborhood, formal
organizations or work. Community networks now contain high proportions of people who enjoy
each other and low proportions of people who are forced to interact with each other
because they are juxtaposed in the same neighborhood, kinship group, organization or
workplace (Feld 1981). 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. Wellman and Gulia’s surfer
chapter suggests that the proliferation of computer-mediated communication will only
accelerate this trend.

In the bad old days, before the 1960s, people feared that community had
disappeared.

In the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, people thought community
was thriving naturally, as a combined group love-in and support-in.

In the entrepreneurial days of present time, the product of a
neo-conservative zeitgeist, people think that community flourishes only if they go
out and pull its strings.

But community is not a bad black hole, it is not a solidary, all-loving
group, and it is probably not even a set of exchange freaks playing "let’s make
a deal!"

It is a network - nebulous, far-flung and sparsely-knit, but real and
supportive.