Ch.10 and 12 Commentary

I promised Paul I would compose some thoughts on the readings since I was out last Monday taking my SILS comp exam. Not sure if you talked mostly about Chapter 10 (Capitalizing on the Net) or 12 (The Not So Global Village of Netville), but I'll focus mainly on the latter. I will say about the former that the results were rather unremarkable. Given the years in which the study was undertaken and the data was originally gathered (2001 and 2000, respectively), I'd be curious to know whether some of the findings still hold true today. For instance, the fact that the telephone (45%)--as opposed to email (24%)--was the predominant medium for communication for people within a 50km distance in the network may have shifted considerably. And in general, across all distances, email may have since been surpassed by other modes of communicating (IM, SMS, social network sites), at least among the under 25 crowd. (A colleague of mine shared an anecdote with me on Friday, saying that an undergrad recently had told him that email is for "old people and institutions." Ouch.) One other takeaway from Ch. 10 for me was, "The results show that the Internet supplements political activities but does not change people's level of involvement" (p.312) Again, maybe not surprising, but perhaps subject to a slight uptick in recent years of Internet use.

As for Ch. 12 on Netville, although it wasn't exactly a stinging defeat for the utopians who saw huge potential for social change in the form of a highly-connected planned community, the data surely didn't offer a great deal of evidence that such a setup leads to an increase in overall social contact or support. I found it interesting that two of the only statistically significant factors in the former case were age and level of education. As stated on page 357, "Being connected to the local network has the same effect on boosting social contact as four more years of education or nearly thirteen years of increased age." See kids, you just need to stay in school and get older! Who needs the bleedin' Internet?! ;)

It was encouraging to read that the wired members of Netville managed to maintain pre-move levels of support for contacts across all distances and that on average they knew more names of their neighbors than did non-wired community members. But I liked the point near the end of the chapter that equally important to the forming of ties is the presence of gathering places (cafés and such) and access. I think these crucial real-world contributing factors are what makes a place like Carrboro such a vibrant and connected community, whatever the level of CMC that exists among its generally well-educated population.