Grieving for a Lost Network: Collective Action in a Wired Suburb

Author: Hampton K.N.¹

Source: The Information Society, Volume 19, Number 5, Nov-Dec 2003 , pp. 417-428(12)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

Critics have argued that information and communication technologies (ICTs) disconnect people from their social networks and reduce public participation. Research in support of this perspective has been biased by two assumptions. The first is a tendency to privilege the Internet as a social system removed from the other ways people communicate. The second is a tendency to favor broadly supportive strong social ties. Survey and ethnographic observations from Netville, a 2-year community networking experiment, suggest that weak, not strong ties experience growth as a result of ICTs. By examining a unique and underexplored stage in the life cycle of a community networking project, the end of a networking trial, this article demonstrates how ICTs facilitate community participation and collective action (a) by creating large, dense networks of relatively weak social ties and (b) through the use of ICTs as an organizing tool.

Keywords: collective action; community informatics; community networking; computer-mediated communication; social networks; social ties; weak ties

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

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