ancient cities

computer-mediated communication, is inferior to
in-person contact, there is only a slight difference
in how people rate the quality of online interactions
in comparison with face-to-face and telephone
conversations. There is little doubt that new
media can be used in the exchange of aid and support.
However, despite the ubiquity of Internet use,
in-person and telephone contact remain the dominant
modes of connectivity when people communicate
with their closest ties.
While Internet use does not appear to reduce the
number of contacts or frequency of communication,
it is less clear how it influences the composition
of personal networks and where people
maintain their networks. Related to the question of
whether the Internet substitutes for other means of
social contact is the question of whether new media
shift the maintenance of personal networks out of
the public and into private spheres of interaction.
Robert Putnam documented extensive evidence
demonstrating that, starting in the 1970s, Americans
have gradually spent less and less time with members
of their social networks. A similar pattern of
declining social capital has been found in other
countries, such as Australia and Britain. These
studies suggest that people have been exchanging
public participation for private interactions; people
are increasingly likely to socialize in small groups
in private homes rather than with large groups in
public spaces. Although the Internet and other new
media originated too recently to be responsible for
the trends observed by Putnam and others, there is
some evidence that new media facilitate privatism.
Research by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin,
and Matthew Brashears on the size and composition
of people’s core “discussion networks,” identified
a decline in the number of people with whom
the average person discuses important matters, as
well as a shift away from public participation
toward networks found in the private sphere of the
home. Although McPherson and his colleagues do
not directly link Internet use to changes in social
networks, the time period they studied overlaps
with the rise of the Internet. This finding is also
consistent with existing observations that link
home-based media use, including television and
the telephone, to increased privatism. Increased
home centeredness comes at the expense of interaction
in traditional public and neighborhood
spaces, spaces that have traditionally provided
exposure to diverse people as well as new cultural
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and political information. If opportunities for
interaction with those beyond the private sphere
decline, so do opportunities for exposure to diverse
social networks and resources.
In an attempt to directly examine the circumstances
under which the Internet does or does not
encourage privatism, a number of studies have
examined the role of Internet use in different urban
settings, such as neighborhoods.
Netville
ICTs and Neighborhoods
The Netville study was one of the first studies to
specifically test the impact of new information and
communication technologies on social relationships
at the neighborhood level. The Netville
experiment was an attempt to provide future levels
of Internet connectivity and services to a typical
middle-class suburban neighborhood that was
located outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Residents who moved to the community were
promised free broadband Internet access, online
music services, online health services, and a variety
of communication tools, such as a videophone,
instant messaging, multimedia chat rooms, and a
neighborhood e-mail discussion list. However,
unanticipated problems in the deployment of the
technology left almost half of the community residents
without any kind of Internet connectivity at
all. A researcher, Keith Hampton, moved into the
community and spent two years interviewing community
residents and conducting an ethnography
that compared “wired” and “nonwired” residents.
The results of the Netville study suggested that
despite the common characterization of the Internet
as a global media that facilitates distant connections,
it can also afford very local interactions.
When wired residents were compared with nonwired
neighbors, those who received access to
Netville’s technology were more involved with
their community: They recognized three times as
many neighbors, talked to twice as many, visited
50 percent more in person, and called them on the
telephone four times as often. Although those with
the technology had more ties and more frequent
interactions in person and over the telephone, it
was relatively weak, not strong, intimate ties that
were formed as a result of the services. Consistent
with Mark Granovetter’s theory of weak ties, the