“E-Associations? Using Internet to Connect Citizens: the Case of Meetup.com” by Thomas Sander
Paper Prepared for American Political Science Association Conference, Sept. 2005
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By a host of different measures American have pulled back from their communities over
the last generation.
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We vote less, see our neighbors less, socialize less, go to church less
often, attend meetings less frequently, and even bowl less in teams (the title factoid of
“bowling alone”), to name only a few indicative measures. This declining engagement
with others can be captured by the concept of “social capital”. Social trust stands for the
value of social networks, stemming from the trust, reciprocity and information flows they
lead to.
3
Many have suggested that the Internet and technology were somehow to blame
for this era of disengagement and our declining social capital. While some forms of
technology (like air conditioning or the car) may have played a contributing role, if by
technology one means computers and the Internet, these civic declines were already well
underway by the 1970s, long before the Internet was publicly available and personal
computers were ubiquitous.
But what role will the Internet play in the future? More and more of us are connected
now to the Internet, and we spend increasing amounts of time behind these screens.
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And
the range of what we do over the Internet has expanded dramatically, and now includes
many tasks that we used to do in more public settings: like banking, shopping, research
and reading, entertainment, etc. Will the Internet help turn around the declines in “social
capital” we’ve experienced over the last generation, or exacerbate them?
Does the Internet Help or Hurt Our Levels of Civic Connection
In principle the Internet could be social-capital-enhancing.
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This is hardly an inclusive
list, but for example:
• Cheap and efficient e-mail, list serves or even “phone over Internet” may make it
easier to communicate with a wide circle of friends and thus to maintain
geographically distant networks;
• The Internet may enable work from home, making it easier to maintain ties to
family and community
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;
2
For a relatively thorough summary of this evidence see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: the Collapse and
Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
3
For a fuller description of why social capital benefits communities, see Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone:
the Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 21-25.
4
For example, in Annenberg Center’s Digital Future Project they found that users were spending 12.5
hours online a week, the highest in the five years that they surveyed in (from 2000-2004).
http://www.digitalcenter.org/downloads/DigitalFutureReport-Year4-2004.pdf
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About 63% of Americans were connected to the Internet in February 2004 in the roughly 10 years since it
has been available as a tool. [Pew Internet and American Life Surveys (200-2004). And evidence as early
as 1998 suggests that time on the Internet was coming out of leisure activities. [Strategis Group's 1998
Internet User Trends Report indicating that Internet and online services by the American public is reducing
time spent watching TV/VCR, reading, and exercise.]
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For a more extensive list of the way in which the Internet could have pro-social effects, see Paul Resnick,
”Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital” (Chapter 29 in "HCI in the New Millennium", ed.
John M. Carroll. Addison-Wesley. 2002, pp. 247-272), or see Wellman 2001. “Physical Place and
Cyberspace: The Rise of Personalized Networking” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
25:227-252; or Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan Haase et al. (2001) “Does the Internet Increase, Decrease, or
Supplement Social Capital?” American Behavioral Scientist 45(3):436-455 at, p. 438.
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Albeit, potentially at the expense of social ties to work colleagues.
Convention