Examining Community in the Digital Neighborhood: Early Results from Canada's Wired Suburb

Can supportive, sociable and meaningful relations be maintained online? Will life online replace, complement, or supplant life in the flesh? Netville is a residential development located in suburban Toronto equipped with a high-speed network as part of its design. The clustering of homes within this area allowed us to study the social networks, civic involvement, Internet use, and attitudes of residents. We are interested in how living in a residential community equipped with no cost, very high speed access to the Internet affects the kinds of interpersonal relations people have with coworkers, friends, relatives, and neighbors. This paper explores the research goals and methods used in the Netville project and introduces preliminary results on the effect of living in a new residential development equipped with no-cost, very high-speed access to the Internet on neighborhood social relations. 1 Portions of this work are reprinted with permission from “Netville On-Line and Off-Line: Observing and Surveying a Wired Suburb,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 43 No. 3., (November/December 1999) 475-492, copyright 1999 Sage Publications, Inc. This research was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Bell Canada University Laboratories, and Communication and Information Technologies Ontario. At the University of Toronto, we have received support from the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, the Department of Sociology, and the Knowledge Media Design Institute. We thank a host of people for their comments, assistance, and support. At the University of Toronto: Ronald Baecker, Dean Behrens, Nadia Bello, Bonnie Erickson, Nancy Howell, Todd Irvine, Emmanuel Koku, Alexandra Marin, Antonia Maughn, Dolly Mehra, William Michelson, Nancy Nazer, Christien Perez, Janet Salaff, Anne Shipley, Richard Stren, and Carlton Thorne. Others: Ross Barclay, Donald Berkowitz, Damien DeShane, Jerome Durlak, Herbert Gans, Paul Hoffert, Timothy Hollett, Thomas Jurenka, Robert Kraut, Marc Smith, Liane Sullivan, and Richard Valentine. Our greatest debt is to the many residents of Netville who have given us their time and patience, allowing us into their homes, and answering many, many, questions. For more papers on Netville and related projects please visit our websites: http://www.mysocialnetwork.net/ http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/ Hampton, Keith., and Barry Wellman (2000). Examining Community in the Digital Neighborhood: Early Results from Canada’s Wired Suburb. In Toru Ishida and Katherine Isbister (Eds.), Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1765. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag. p. 194-208. © Springer-Verlag For information on this volume please visit: http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/tocs/t1765.htm Examining Community in the Digital Neighborhood 195