Netville
= study on the impact of the internet on a Toronto suburb
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)." (http://johnpostill.co.uk/articles/postill_localising_net.pdf)
More Information
- Suburban Internet Studies
- 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.