The internet is a friend of community

On Friday I went to a talk by Barry Wellman about "What is the internet doing to community?" This was a big talk that covered a lot of ground. The themes it touched included the so-called "death of community" or the bowling alone phenomenon (see Robert Putnam's work). Wellman and his team found that online ties were supplementing real life ties, and people were finding new ways to be close on the internet. Local ties still mattered, and households were becoming networked, e.g., people were functioning as a family unit even if they were not a nuclear family sitting under one roof. The networked household and domesticated internet is the dissertation topic of one of Wellman's grad students, Tracy Kennedy.

The notion of a distributed household is relevant to my own dissertation where my participants in Bangalore were part of a family even though they didn't live in the same house or the same city. Technology creates the umbrella that they all sit under.