“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
- 3-
• New Internet-based tools (like evite.com, or e-neighbors, etc.) may make it easier
to invite others to social events or to keep in contact with neighbors;
• The Internet can make participation easier for certain pockets of individuals, such
as:
o Elderly shut-ins or those with physical disabilities or
o Individuals who are not open about some fact in their life (that they have
breast cancer, that they are gay, etc.) to find community with like-minded
individuals while keeping this aspect of their life hidden from the larger
community.
But the Internet could also be socially isolating, for example by
8
:
• Causing individuals to lose opportunities to socialize with others by shopping or
banking on-line;
• Substituting real face-to-face connections with virtual ones (in which anonymity
is greater and trust is harder to build);
• Building communities where exit is much easier than in real communities
resulting in lower investment in one’s good reputation, less commitment to work
through difficulties when conflict arises, etc.
9
• Causing our communities to become ever more specialized – what van Alstyne
called “cyber-balkanization”.
10
To be sure, sorting out the social impact of the Internet is a complicated affair. First of
all, the Internet is multi-faceted (covering everything from home shopping to chat groups
to virtual games to sites where users research and gather information) and protean (how
we use it today may not be how we used it a year ago or will use it five or ten years from
now). Second, there are selection effects since who uses the Internet and the speed of
their Internet connection is likely a function of visible social factors (education,
income)
11
and invisible factors that may lead some to the Internet sooner than others; for
this reason, it is hard to disentangle the impact of the Internet from who is drawn to the
Internet.
Some have used longitudinal studies to rule out such selection effects and have found a
pro-social impact of the Internet or at least found no statistically significant negative
8
See also 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 pp. 439-440.
9
Galston, William. (1999) “How Does the Internet Affect Community? Some Speculations In Search of
Evidence” in democracy.com ed. Elaine Kamarck and Joseph Nye (Hollis Publishing).
10
Van Alstyne, M. and E. Brynjolfsson (1996) “Widening Access and Narrowing Focus: Could the Internet
Balkanize Science?” Science 274 (5292):1479-1480 or see Sunstein, Cass. (2001) Republic.com (Princeton
University Press).
11
See Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. NY: Free Press, 1995, for a discussion of the role of
various types of capital (human, social, financial) in the speed of adoption of new technologies. If the
digital divide disappears in the future so will the selection effect issue, but Paul Dimaggio and Joseph
Cohen in a thoughtful paper indicate that while access to the Internet may become nearly universal, other
digital divides are like to persist (connection speed, knowledge of how to use the Internet or make sense of
information on the Internet). DiMaggio, Paul, and Joseph Cohen. "Information Inequality and Network
Externalities: A Comparative Study of the Diffusion of Television and the Internet." DiMaggio, Paul, and
Joseph Cohen. [http://inequality.princeton.edu/papers/dimaggio-inequality.pdf]
Convention