The internet has transformed the way in which we connect and communicate with others, but how far does online interaction translate into real-world civic engagement? Aleks Krotoski investigates.

In 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, a book documenting the deterioration in public participation, social engagement and community involvement in late 20th-century America. He argued that the decrease in membership numbers in key civic organisations meant that civil society in the US was spiralling towards a future of isolation and unrest. The culprits Putnam identified were the typical 20th-century bad guys: urbanisation, a culture of fear and an increase in media consumption. The outcome was a loss of social capital, the glue that holds a working society together and prevents us from destroying ourselves and others.

Mandarins from Washington to Whitehall, who had been wringing their hands over the well-documented decline in political participation, welcomed the book. It provided the evidence they needed to pour public cash into policies aimed at tempting the apathetic masses back into effective social engagement. In reality, they needn't have bothered. The number of Boy Scouts and due-paying party members may have declined, but social participation is booming. This is true even though people's use of the internet – which Putnam cited as an enemy of social capital – has increased. In fact, the internet has helped to reintroduce us to one another and has inspired us to get involved with our local communities.

Crucial to this are online social networks, websites that allow people to connect with friends and strangers based on existing relationships or commonalities. The most successful current example is Facebook. It works on the same principles as the very first social network, sixdegrees.com: each person has a home page to customise and the tools to reach out to others. Sites such as Facebook articulate connections by allowing people to see who knows whom, offering suggestions for new contacts based on connections between them and delivering news about people in the network direct to the home page. They keep users in the loop, taking the guesswork out of social interaction and providing a one-click megaphone to a community. With these facilities at their heart, they have naturally emerged as hubs of influence, activism and civic action.

Professor Barry Wellman and his colleague Keith Hampton at the University of Toronto have explored the relationship between online networks and civic participation. Their research in 'Netville', the first real-world community to have permanent high-speed internet access, described how computer mediation affected real-world engagement. They found that it transformed the number of contacts residents had: users of the local online forum interacted with more of their neighbours than those who didn't. It transformed the sense of proximity between residents: neighbours communicated with people who were more physically dispersed throughout the suburb. And it transformed the speed at which people became part of the community: new residents who used online services reported that they were integrated into neighbourhood life more quickly than those who didn't.

Cyber sceptics

Yet some people remain unconvinced about how much these online services benefit society. Like earlier critics of suburbanisation, the telephone and the automobile, many fear that the internet will disrupt community life by replacing face-to-face interaction. They believe that any increase in ‘domestic privatism', such as a higher uptake of networked computing, may replace communal experiences in cafés, parks and bars, where civic participation takes place. These ‘great good places', as they were described by Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, are locations of meaningful, casual interaction that cement community cohesiveness. In fact, Oldenburg never suggested that these locations had to be physical, and others (such as the sociologist Erving Goffman) have argued that the conceptual sense of belonging drives community more than a tangible location. However, critics of the internet have focused on the importance of physicality, claiming that ‘third places' are impossible to replicate in a lean computer medium.

Many of their concerns parrot one widely reported early internet study, Internet Paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being, published by psychologist Robert Kraut and his colleagues in 1998. The paper argued that the nascent internet increased depression and reduced the size of the social circle. However, their research was conducted when the internet was in its infancy, populated by a relatively small group of tech-savvy early adopters. Three years later, after the dotcom boom brought millions of people online, Kraut and his colleagues revisited their findings in a follow-up paper, Internet Paradox Revisited, which actually showed an increase in offline sociability and community participation. The mass adoption of the internet meant that the prospective size of networks increased with the larger pool of possible contacts: the World Wide Web, with its potential to connect people globally, was paradoxically a technology that connected people locally.

Indeed, Wellman's and Hampton's Netville research found that internet interaction extended rather than replaced face-to-face contact: neighbours used online services to stay in touch or mobilise around local issues. By offering a virtual location to arrange neighbourhood gatherings, report unusual activity on the streets, galvanise support and coordinate action, the internet had truly become a ‘third place'.

Since then, internet use has grown exponentially, with networking applications such as Facebook and blogging software such as Wordpress reducing the barriers to creating online communities. Social networks have become a virtual version of the office water cooler: a place for sociability and sharing. Although they have the potential to help in planning collective action, the most effective groups, such as Meetup.com or Yahoo!'s Upcoming, comprise people located in similar geographic areas.

However, there are a few reasons why large-scale online community participation is not the panacea its proponents suggest. First, what about the people who are not online? Martha Lane Fox, the UK's digital champion, fears that non-participation will lead to more unrest and greater social exclusion. She is working with the public and private sectors to achieve a 90 percent online adoption rate across the UK by the end of 2012. For pragmatic reasons, the government is increasingly using the virtual environment to distribute its services and engage the public; Lane Fox is concerned that those who either choose not to use the internet or do not have access to it will be left behind.

This is partly because the interpersonal activity that takes place in social networks and other online communities is increasingly becoming a vital means of establishing a sense of social belonging. Like children who are left out of the ‘cool gang' in the school playground, people who don't hang out online may find that their offline friendship ties grow weaker. It has taken fewer than 15 years for Robert Kraut's findings to be reversed: today, a failure to use the internet may be detrimental to sociability and participation.

Second, although the internet is an excellent tool for bringing people together, its social transience makes it more difficult to sustain campaigns unless there is a real-world outcome. Public displays of support are relatively cheap on the internet, especially if all a user needs to do is to click a button to show allegiance. Campaigners have found that getting people to join a Facebook group, for example, does not necessarily translate into a real-world action such as donating money.

This so-called 'click-activism' is useful for raising awareness about a cause but demands little commitment. The apparent tools for change therefore become tools for social marketing. Clever marketing managers focus on using awareness-raising techniques that require little investment from the online public, recognising that only those people who would have engaged anyway are likely to go further with financial or other in-kind support. For example, the team behind Barack Obama's campaign in the 2008 US presidential race automated the distribution of support messages. All supporters needed to do was join a Facebook group, embed a banner in a blog or website or respond to an email once, and from then on, messages would automatically be duplicated and distributed to friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

The weakest links

The internet's potential to raise awareness lies in the ‘weak ties' – connections between infrequent contacts or acquaintances – that proliferate online. Once a connection has been made, it requires a proactive action to undo it, so information is broadcast to a wider network than was possible in an age dominated by expensive traditional media. In the violent aftermath of the contested presidential elections in Iran in 2009, the microblogging site Twitter helped people outside the country to discover what was happening on the streets by connecting them directly with the Iranian people. The speed at which information was then distributed among networks meant that this on-the-ground coverage spread around the world, galvanising individuals into action.

Yet the level of social capital generated through the Obama campaign and the Iranian Twitter protests is not sustainable. There are too many online causes vying for eyeballs, and although the numbers appear to indicate that the internet is an effective tool for civic participation, this scale of action is rare. So was Putnam right when he suggested that the internet is unable to support the development of this important interpersonal glue?

Adapting to virtual reality

Researcher Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California argues not only that the internet supports social capital, but also that social capital is the most important currency online. The problem is that social capital researchers have tended to apply offline measures to the online space. To identify online social capital, they need to modify their scales for the lean communication space that is virtual reality. The absence of the cues on which we rely in the physical world – body language, voice tone, clothing – means that people use shortcuts when determining whether or not to establish bonds with other online community members.

There are two forms of social capital and both are relevant to the social network experience. Bridging social capital describes why information spreads so quickly online; the weak ties that define the online social network make it easier for people to connect with one another and - crucially - check up on potential connections via friends or friends of friends. Williams argues that this is the most prevalent type of social capital online. Bonding social capital, however, is developed via the water-cooler moments that occur when people are hanging out in the online third place and has the potential to inspire collective action. Putman was most critical of the internet because he believed it didn't sustain this type of social capital; however, as Williams, Wellman, Hampton and Kraut have all observed, online social networks can and do help cement ties. In fact, the virtual environment is fast becoming one of the most important places for bonding to occur.

This is only likely to increase as developers respond to the feedback of their audiences, who are more and more frequently demanding applications and services that lay the foundations for community. Developers are bound to respond with new ways to encourage connections and casual conversations, because a gaggle of dedicated visitors translates into income from investors and advertisers. As offline sociability is extended through online interaction, more people will be compelled to log on.

It's been a decade since Bowling Alone documented the decline in civic participation in America and, in subsequent years, global events have changed the way in which we view and enact the notion of community. The internet has become a vital source of information, sociability and engagement. The people we know online are our global friends and family, but by bringing them together from all over the world, the internet has become our most important avenue for local change. 

Aleks Krotoski is a broadcaster and journalist.

Flickr: Why a picture is worth a thousand words Photo-sharing site Flickr started out as a computer game. Its founders - Catarina Fake, Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon - had no intention of creating a celebrated social network when they launched the tools for Game Neverending, but the result has been a powerful resource for citizen journalism and social change. Flickr allows users to upload their images and share them with contacts and with internet users around the world. The images are tagged with words or names and can be published to user-generated groups of every description. While Flickr is primarily used to document the mundane – there are almost seven million images tagged ‘cats' – it does offer the potential to communicate social or political messages. For example, a search for 'FU H2' results in almost 6,000 images of people making a rude gesture at a Hummer H2 SUV. This early Flickr meme was started by a group of environmental campaigners who disagreed with the emissions policies of the car manufacturer. Flickr's potential was realised on 7 July 2005, when it became the source of images from the scene of the terrorist attacks on the London Underground. It provided a resource for the mainstream media, as eyewitnesses broke the news on the website, and for friends and family looking for loved ones. This demonstrates the power of instant, interactive and media-rich communication technologies for civic action and public participation.

This is still very much a live debate. At the heart of it is whether online networks cements and sustains links between individuals. Macolm Gladwell says they are too weak:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentP...
prompting howls of protest from the social media vanguard:
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/6678-the-revolution-will-not-be-socialised-sa...