The impact of the Internet on social capital examining everyday life资料.doc

Networking Community:The Internet in Everyday Life Barry Wellman, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen,Keith Hampton, Anabel Quan-Haase, and Isabel Diaz de Isla NetLab, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto wellman@chass.utoronto.ca www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Introduction As the Internet evolves, its users and uses grow and diversify globally. Internet use dramatically increased worldwide between 1995 and 2000.Today, approximately 55 percent of the North American population is online (Howard, Rainie, Jones, 2002; Reddick, Boucher, Groseillers, 2000). For a large proportion of the population of Internet users, Internet access has become a daily activity (Howard et al., 2002). There is less agreement, however, about how the internet has influenced different aspects of society. It is important to understand what the consequences of the diffusion and high use of the Internet are for people’s lives. We present evidence about how people use the Internet, how it fits into their everyday lives, and how it is influencing other aspects of community. Our special concern here is the impact of the Internet on the change in society away from groups and towards individualized networking. This change is not only occurring at the interpersonal level but at the organizational, interorganizational and even the world-systems levels. It is the move from densely-knit and tightly-bounded groups to move sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks. This more to networked societies has profound implications for how people mobilize and how people and governments relate to each other – in all forms of societies – but especially in democracies. Our Toronto-based NetLab has been especially interested in how the Internet has influenced people’s interactions: Do people communicate more because the Internet offers them with the capability to contact people at a distance? Do they primarily communicate via the Internet or are face-to-face meetings, phone calls,