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226 Keith N. Hamptonits ability to be used as an asynchronous form of communication that canengage others not only one-on-one, but as a broadcast of one-to-many.Asynchronous communication facilitates temporal flexibility: people canread and respond to communication at individually convenient times andplaces. Similarly, the broadcast ability of computer-mediated communicationremoves the costs associated with having to travel door to door in organizinglocal activities and in seeking local support. “Like a habitually-frequentedhangout, people show up at their email in-boxes and listen in on the happeningsof their communities, interjecting when appropriate, but often just observing”(Hampton and Wellman, 2003: 286). In fact, there is a growing body ofempirical evidence to suggest that the Internet supports “glocalization,” theadoption of global technologies like the Internet for local use. A survey of4,500 Internet users in nine countries by KRC Research (2003), commissionedby the Oracle Corporation, found that in France, Germany, Italy, and the US,one in every four e-mails never leaves the building in which it originated. Atthe residential level, it is the ability to observe the social happenings of a localcommunity, the ability to broadcast information to others, and the potential tocoordinate off-line activities through online interactions, where there exists thepotential for IT-mediated, place-based community.IT-MEDIATED, PLACE-BASED COMMUNITY: NETVILLE“Netville” is one example of how computer-mediated communication can beused to facilitate local involvement. 1 Indistinguishable in appearance frommost Canadian suburbs, what made this suburban neighborhood of detached,single-family homes notable in comparison to others in the Greater TorontoArea was that it was one of the first developments in the world to be built fromthe ground up with a broadband high-speed local network. Residents withaccess to the local computer network had free use of high-speed Web surfing(10 Mbps), a videophone, an online jukebox, online health services, a series ofonline entertainment and educational applications, and an e-mail discussionlist that allowed residents to broadcast messages to other neighborhood residents.While the intention of the housing developer was to connect all homesin Netville to the local computer network, of the 109 homes that comprised thecommunity, only 64 were ever connected. The remaining 45 households werenever connected to the network, despite assurances that they would beconnected, made at the time residents purchased their new homes.Netville was also unique in that it was the site of one of the first long-terminvestigations of how online communities influenced local place-basedcommunity. In an effort to recognize that online interactions where a subset ofthe total interactions that could take place within Netville, and that online ties