According to Caroline Haythornthwaite and Lori Kendall, professors in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois, online interactions not only have positive outcomes for real-life, place-based communities, but the intersection between online communication and the offline world also forms two halves of a support mechanism for communities.
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“In its earliest incarnation, the online world was considered a separate realm, and it was not viewed as a serious venue for work or business,” Haythornthwaite said. “But as more people have come online, the more online communication has become the norm. So it isn’t thought of as a separate realm anymore, but as one that merges and overlaps with our daily activities.”
From social networking, to civic participation, to community support during emergencies, to providing on-the-ground information in disaster areas, the professors say that the rapid development and widespread use of online technologies – for communicating and networking, for contributing and distributing content, and for storing, sharing and retrieving files – are creating ties that bind for offline communities.
And what about mobile access?
“I think the use of cell phones to access the Web is a bigger factor in connecting the Internet to a local geographical community than the World Wide Web has been,” Kendall said.
Whether they’re posting a status update to Facebook, sending out a tweet from Twitter, or uploading photos to Flickr, “people have a cell phone with them in physical space, and they connect that physical space to the Internet when they use their cell phones for Internet access,” she said.
Note: The article this overview stems from is titled, “Internet and Community” and appears in the April, 2010 issue of American Behavioral Scientist 53.8.
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