Suburban Internet Studies
= study of the local impact of the internet in suburbs
Description
John Postill:
"The two main suburban Internet studies to date to discuss residential sociality and banal activism provide useful entry points but are marred by their adherence to the community/network paradigm. The better known study was conducted by Keith Hampton in the Toronto suburb of ‘Netville’ (a pseudonym) in 1997-1999. Hampton combined survey research with participant observation in this new ‘wired-up’ locality to study the impact of the Internet on ‘local community’ (Hampton and Wellman 2003). He found that the Internet helped Netville’s settlers to make new friends and acquaintances both in their own immediate neighbourhoods and across the suburb, as well as being able to maintain older ties with geographically dispersed friends and relatives. Residents with the most online contacts also tended to have the most offline contacts in the suburb. In accordance with Granovetter’s ‘strength of weak ties’ dictum, local residents drew on their new contacts to make further contacts for information, socialising, mutual aid, etc, in the process increasing their local ‘social capital’. The web of social ties thus created had important political implications as well, for it allowed residents to mobilise effectively when the developers attempted to withdraw the very technologies that had facilitated the collective production of sociality (Hampton 2003, Hampton and Wellman 2003).
A more recent study was conducted by Yael Levanon in the Tel Aviv suburbs of Ramat Beit-Shemesh and Modiin, the former settled by orthodox Jews, the latter by both religious and secular families. Levanon’s starting point was, like Hampton’s, the North American literature on the reported decline in community social capital (Putnam 1995, see also Putnam 2000). His aim was to study ‘community networking’ and its effect on local ties. On the basis of a questionnaire delivered to users of two local mailing lists, Mesch and Levanon (2003) argue that the Internet has allowed residents to find like-minded others across their suburb with whom to exchange information, socialise and cooperate – a finding that echoes the Netville study. Another similarity was the use of the Internet for banal activism, in the Israeli case to oppose the building of a new mall that would open on Saturdays and offer non-kosher food. Yet, in contrast to their North American counterparts, the Tel Aviv settlers had little need for the Internet at the immediate neighbourhood level, for in Israel the neighbourhood remains a fulcrum of sociality.
These two studies further our understanding of Internet localisation in suburban settings in a number of ways. First, they point at cross-cultural similarities as well as contrasts in the Internet-shaped making of suburban socialities. In both countries, suburban families with young children and dual-career parents are driven by the imperative to find and maintain a social environment conducive to family-building and class reproduction (see Miller 1995); an imperative that shapes their use of Internet technologies. However, the specific ‘banal’ issues that matter to residents can vary greatly from one locale to another, even within the same country. For instance, plans to build a non-kosher restaurant were resisted by orthodox not secular Jews in suburban Tel Aviv. Second, the two studies demonstrate the continued usefulness of Granovetter’s theory of ‘weak ties’ in contexts other than Boston’s 1970s job market (see also Haythornthwaite 1998, Amit 2007), enabling their authors to correct the overemphasis on ‘strong’, affective ties found in the community informatics literature (Hampton 2003). Third, these studies shed light on the critical importance of two specific ‘Internet affordances’ (Wellman et al 2003), namely its interactivity and asynchronicity, to suburban residents who are able to engage with local issues despite their work and childcare commitments.
These studies are not, however, without their shortcomings. First, they are both examples of the connectionist strand of social network analysis (SNA) discussed earlier. This weakens their explanatory power when it comes to structural or ‘field’ questions. Murali Venkatesh (2003: 344-345) has broached such field-related questions with reference to Hampton’s Netville research and suggested, following Melucci (1996), that collective action is always tethered to relational structures (or fields) that constrain action, although ‘breakthrough social agency is always possible’. This relational line of inquiry is not pursued, though, in Hampton’s own work.
Both studies are furthermore caught up in the community/network semantic tangle, for instance by making contradictory use of the term ‘community’. Thus, in Mesch and Levanon’s (2003) analysis, community is used in places to refer to a pre-existing, unspecified collectivity (‘the local community’), in others to the future outcome of an ongoing effort (‘community-building’), yet in others to the suburb in its entirety (‘the extended community’) as opposed to the neighbourhood. As I have argued earlier, community is a vague notion favoured in public rhetoric, not a sharp analytical tool with an identifiable empirical object. Amit (2002: 14) puts it well: ‘Invocations of community… do not present analysts with clear-cut groupings so much as signal fields of complex processes through which sociality is sought, rejected, argued over, realised, interpreted, exploited or enforced’ (my emphasis)." (http://johnpostill.co.uk/articles/postill_localising_net.pdf)
More Information
Bibliography:
- Hampton, K.N. (2003) ‘Grieving for a Lost Network: Collective Action in a Wired Suburb’, The Information Society 19: 417-428.
- Hampton, K. N. and B. Wellman (2003) ‘Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb’, City and Community 2(3): 277–311.