Annenberg’s Keith Hampton’s research published in Information, Communication & Society and reported on local television.

Monday, November 26, 2007

View the associated web page

---

Research into the ability of the Internet to increase the number of social ties in a neighborhood conducted by Keith Hampton, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, was reported in the October 2007 edition of Information, Communication, and Society magazine.

In the article, penned by Dr. Hampton, the results of a long-term study of neighborhoods where residents used lists of e-mail addresses of their neighbors. The study showed that, in the right context, the Internet can help bridge gaps that exist among neighbors and help foster a feeling of community.

Additionally, the effectiveness of the i-neighbors project Dr. Hampton spearheads was reported just last week on WTOC television in Savannah, GA. This news story highlighted how the project helped alert residents of a Savannah neighborhood to the fact that an armed robbery had just taken place. The full story can be found by following this link (you may need to cut and paste it into a browser) http://www.WTOCTV.com/Global/story.asp?s=7393338

Article Abstract

This study examines whether the Internet is increasingly a part of everyday neighborhood interactions, and in what specific contexts Internet use affords the formation of local social ties. Studies of Internet and community have found that information and communication technologies provide new opportunities for social interaction, but that they may also increase privatism by isolating people in their homes. This paper argues that while the Internet may encourage communication across great distances, it may also facilitate interactions near the home. Unlike traditional community networking studies, which focus on bridging the digital divide, this study focuses on bridging the divide between the electronic and parochial realms. Detailed, longitudinal social network surveys were completed with the residents of four contrasting neighborhoods over a period of three years. Three of the four neighborhoods were provided with a neighborhood email discussion list and a neighborhood website. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to model over time the number of strong and weak ties, emailed, met in-person, and talked to on the telephone. The neighborhood email lists were also analyzed for content. The results suggest that with experience using the Internet, the size of local social networks and email communication with local networks increases. The addition of a neighborhood email list further increases the number of weak neighborhood ties, but does not increase communication multiplexity. However, neighborhood effects reduce the influence of everyday Internet use, as well as the experimental intervention, in communities that lack the context to support local tie formation.