The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism - 0 views
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in all forms of societies � but especially in democracies. That is because democracies are heavily in the business of dealing with the aggregated demands of their citizenries. Historically, these demands have had geographically-defined, multilevel aggregation, with local and regional groups dealing with central groups who represent them to central governments. To some extent, electronic citizenship can merely replicate this pattern., with e-mail being just another way to communicate between such groups, and the Web being just another way for central groups and governments to communicate to local groups and citizens. For example, the Scottish Parliament now accepts petitions on e-mail and publishes much of its discussion. This exercise in e-citizenship speeds up communication and information diffusion. But such e-citizenship also facilitates, and to some extent reinforces, mass society, with the individual in direct relationship with the state without the intermediary of local and even central groups.
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Our research suggests that the Internet is not a self-contained world. Rather than operating at the expense of the �real� face-to-face world, it is an extension, with people using all means of communication to connect with friends and relatives. The Internet is another means of communication that is being integrated into the regular patterns of social life. Other NetLab research suggests that this integration of online and offline life is also true for communities of practice at work (Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 1998; Koku, Nazer, & Wellman, 2001; Koku & Wellman, in press).
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Communities and societies have been changing towards networked societies where boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive (Castells, 2000; Wellman, 1997, 1999, 2001). Hence, many people and organizations communicate with others in ways that ramify across group boundaries. Rather than relating to one group, they cycle through interactions with a variety of others, at work or in the community. Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries.
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The developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community.
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Computer-supported communication is everywhere, but it is situated nowhere. It is I-alone that is reachable wherever I am: at a home, hotel, office, highway, or shopping center. The person has become the portal.
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This shift facilitates personal communities that supply the essentials of community separately to each individual: support, sociability, information, social identities, and a sense of belonging. The person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity. Just as 24/7/365 Internet computing means the ready availability of people in specific places, the proliferation of mobile phones and wireless computing increasingly is coming to mean an even greater availability of people without regard to place. Supportive convoys travel ethereally with each person (Ling & Ytrri, 2002; Katz, 2002).
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Networked individualism should have profound effects on social cohesion. Rather than feeling a part of a hierarchy of encompassing polities, like nesting Russian dolls, people believe they belong to multiple, partial communities and polities. Some may be global, such as is found in electronic diasporas linking dispersed members of emigrant ethnic groups (Mitra, 2003). Some may be traditional local groups of neighbors with connectivity enhanced by listservs and other forms of computer-mediated communication (Hampton, 2001), for NetLab�s research has fit into the growing realization that the McLuhanesque �global village� (1962) complements traditional communities rather than replacing them. McLuhan argued, �the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.� Yet, in a person�s �glocalized� world (Wellman, 2003, in press), extensive local involvements fit together with far-flung communities of friendship, kinship and shared interest. This is especially true today when almost all computers are physically wired into the Internet, rooting people to their desk chairs. Yet even as the world goes wireless, the persistence of tangible interests, such as neighborly get-togethers or local intruders, will keep the local important. E-citizenship will be both local and global.