NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW, vol. 89, no. 3, Fall 2000 Jossey-Bass, a Wiley company 193

Does the Internet StrengthenCommunity?

William A. Galston

Suppose that, in the summer of 1952, someone had organized a conference onthe social consequences of television. The participants would have faced twocrucial problems. First, social reality was moving faster than empirical schol-arship. Television was diffusing at an explosive rate, from a relative rarity inthe late 1940s to near-ubiquity only a decade later. Scholars in 1952, studyingthe social effects of television, might have noted how neighbors crowded intoa living room to watch the only set on the block, and they might have drawnconclusions about the mediums community-reinforcing tendencies that wouldhave seemed antiquated only a few years later.

The second problem would have been even more daunting. Reasoning byanalogy from, for example, the automobiles effects on sexual morality in the1920s, the participants might have suspected that televisions unintended con-sequences would turn out to be at least as significant as its directly contem-plated purposes. But they would have been hard-pressed to move muchbeyond this general insight. The emergence of a new communications tech-nology within a complex social system was bound to reconfigure everythingfrom intimate relations to the distribution of public power. But how, exactly?According to Alan Ehrenhalt, the front stoop was one of the centers of sociallife in Chicagos blue-collar neighborhoods of the early 1950s.1 But during thatdecade, the introduction of television into nearly every home affected not onlythe dissemination of news and entertainment, but also patterns of social inter-action. Families spent more time clustered around the television set, and lesstime talking with their neighbors on the street. In turn, the increased atom-ization of social life had important ripple effects. Spontaneous neighborhoodoversight and discipline of children became harder to maintain, and lessdensely populated streets opened the door for increased criminal activity.

I dont mean to suggest (nor does Ehrenhalt) that television was solelyresponsible for these changes; the advent of air conditioning also helped

Note: This article has been excerpted from www.democracy.com, Governance in a Net-worked World (ed. Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye, Jr.). Copyright 1999 byHollis Publishing Company; reprinted with permission.

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depopulate streets by making the indoors far more habitable during summersdog days, and important cultural changes reduced the influence of variousforms of authority that helped hold neighborhoods and communities together.I do want to suggest, however, that today it is as if it were 1952 for the Inter-net, and the methodological problems I have just sketched are the ones wemust confront in assessing the impact of this new medium. In the face of suchchallenges, it is natural, perhaps inevitable, that our thought will prove lessflexible and our imagination less capacious than the future we seek to capture.In our minds eye, we may hold constant what will prove to be most mutable.One of my favorite examples of this principle from the past (there are many)comes from an article published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1888:

The time is not far distant when we will have wagons driving around withcasks and jars of stored electricity, just as we have milk and bread wagons atpresent. . . . The arrangements will be of such a character that houses can besupplied with enough stored electricity to last twenty-four hours. All that theman with the cask will have to do will be to drive up to the back door, detachthe cask left the day before, replace it with a new one, and then go to the nexthouse and do likewise.2

As Carolyn Marvin points out, this vision of the future reflects the assump-tion of and hope for the continuation of the economically and morally self-sufficient household, not beholden to outside forces, and going about its ownbusinessa way of life undermined by the very patterns of distribution and con-centration that electrical power helped foster.

I draw two lessons from this cautionary example. First, in speculatingabout the effects of the Internet on community life, we should be sensitive tothe often surprising ways in which market forces can shape emerging tech-nologies to upset entrenched social patterns. (This maxim is particularlyimportant for an era such as ours, in which the market is practically and ide-ologically ascendant.) Second, we should be as self-conscious as possible aboutthe cultural assumptions and trends that will shape our use of and response tonew technologies such as the Internet. Contemporary American society, Iwould argue, is structured by two principal cultural forces: the high valueattached to individual choice and the longing for community.

Choice and Community

During the past generation, scholars in a range of disciplines have traced therise of choice as a core value. Daniel Yankelovich suggests that what he callsthe affluence effectthe psychology of prosperity that emerged as memoriesof the Depression fadedweakened traditional restraints: People came to feelthat questions of how to live and with whom to live were a matter of individ-ual choice not to be governed by restrictive norms. As a nation, we came to

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experience the bonds to marriage, family, children, job, community, and coun-try as constraints that were no longer necessary.3

In Ehrenhalts analysis, the new centrality of choice is a key explanationfor the transformation of Chicagos neighborhoods since the 1950s. LawrenceFriedman argues that individual choice is the central norm around which themodern American legal system has been restructured. Alan Wolfe sees indi-vidual choice at the heart of the nonjudgmental tolerance that characterizesmiddle-class morality in contemporary America.4

The problem (emphasized by these authors) is that as individual choiceexpands, the bonds linking us to others tend to weaken. To the extent that thedesire for satisfying human connections is a permanent feature of the humancondition, the expansion of choice was bound to trigger an acute sense of loss,now expressed as a longing for community. The remarkable public responseto Robert Putnams Bowling Alone can in part be attributed to this sentiment.But few Americans are willing to surrender the expansive individual libertythey now enjoy, even in the name of stronger marriages, neighborhoods, or cit-izenship. This tension constitutes what many Americans experience as the cen-tral dilemma of our age, which is, as Wolfe puts it, how to be an autonomousperson and [be] tied together with others at the same time.5

I do not believe that this problem can ever be fully solved; to some extent,strong ties are bound to require compromises of autonomy, and vice versa.(This exemplifies Isaiah Berlins pluralist account of our moral condition: thegenuine goods of life are diverse and in tension with one another, so that nosingle good can be given pride of place without sacrificing others.) Still, thereis an obvious motivation for reducing this tension as far as possiblethat is,for finding ways of living that combine individual autonomy and strong socialbonds.

This desire gives rise to a concept that I will call voluntary community.This conception of social ties compatible with autonomy has three definingconditions: low barriers to entry, low barriers to exit, and interpersonal rela-tions shaped by mutual adjustment rather than by hierarchical authority orcoercion. Part of the excitement surrounding the Internet is what some see asthe possibility it offers of facilitating the formation of voluntary communities,so understood. Others doubt that the kinds of social ties likely to develop onthe Internet can be adequate substitutespractically or emotionallyfor thetraditional ties they purport to replace.

Are on-line groups communities? In a prophetic account written thirtyyears ago, Licklider and Taylor suggested that life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly willbe selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents ofproximity. Whether Internet users are in fact happier and, if so, because theyare users, remains to be seen and may never be known (the problems ofresearch design for that issue boggle the mind). The underlying hypothesisthat accidents of proximity are on balance a source of unhappinessseems

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incomplete at best. But Licklider and Taylor were certainly right to predictthat on-line communication would facilitate the growth of groups with sharedinterests. Indeed, participation in such groups is now the second most fre-quent interactive activity (behind e-mail) among Internet users.6

Anecdotal evidence suggests that these groups fill a range of significant needsfor their participants. For some, the exchange of information and opinions aboutshared enthusiasmssuch as rock groups and sports teamsis satisfying as anend in itself. For others, this exchange serves important personal or professionalgoals. Those suffering from specific diseases can share information about promis-ing doctors, therapies, and treatment centers more widely and rapidly than everbefore. A friend of mine who works as the lone archivist in a city library systemtells me that participating in the on-line group of archivists from around thecountry mitigates her otherwise intense sense of personal and professional iso-lation. In this regard, computer-mediated communication can be understood asraising to a higher power the kinds of non-place-based relationships and asso-ciations that have existed for centuries in industrialized societies.

But are these shared activities communities? What is at stake in thisquestion? J. Snyder, a commentator skeptical of the claims of technocommu-nitarian enthusiasts, argues that a community is more than a bunch of peopledistributed in all 24 time zones, sitting in their dens and pounding away onkeyboards about the latest news in alt.music.indigo-girls. Thats not a com-munity; its a fan club. Newsgroups, mailing lists, chat roomscall them whatyou willthe Internets virtual communities are not communities in almostany sense of the word. A community is people who have greater things in com-mon than a fascination with a narrowly defined topic.7

Note that this objection revolves around the substance of what membersof groups have in common, not the nature of the communication among them.By this standard, stamp clubs meeting face to face would not qualify as com-munities. Conversely, Jews in the diaspora would constitute a community, evenif the majority never meet one another face to face, because what they have incommon is a sacred text as an authoritative guide to the totality of temporaland spiritual existence.

To assess these claims, we may begin with Thomas Benders classic defi-nition of community: A community involves a limited number of people in asomewhat restricted social space or network held together by shared under-standings and a sense of obligation. Relationships are close, often intimate, andusually face to face. Individuals are bound together by affective or emotionalties rather than by a perception of individual self-interest. There is a we-nessin a community; one is a member.8

Upper-middle-class American professionals tend to dismiss this picture ofcommunity as the idealization of a past that never was. But Bender insists thatit offers a tolerably accurate picture of town life in America prior to the twen-tieth century:

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The town was the most important container for the social lives of men andwomen, and community was found within it. . . . The geographic place seemsto have provided a supportive human surround that can be visualized in theimage of concentric circles. . . . The innermost ring encompassed kin, whilethe second represented friends who were treated as kin. Here was the coreexperience of community. Beyond these rings were two others: those withwhom one dealt regularly and thus knew, and, finally, those people who wererecognized as members of the town but who were not necessarily known.9

A recent personal experience has convinced me that community, so under-stood, is not simply part of a vanished past. On a recent trip to Portugal, myfamily stopped for the night at the small town of Condeixa, about ten milessouth of the medieval University of Coimbra. After dinner, I went to the vil-lage square, where I spent one of the most remarkable evenings of my life.Children frolicked on playground equipment set up in the square. Parentsoccupied some of the benches positioned under symmetrical rows of trees; onothers, old men sat and talked animatedly. At one point, a group of middle-aged men, some carrying portfolios of papers, converged on the square anddiscussed what seemed to be some business or local matters. The square wasringed by modest cafs and restaurants, some catering to teenagers and youngadults, others to parents and families.

From time to time a squabble would break out among the children play-ing in the square; a parent would leave a caf table, smooth over the conflict,and return to the adult conversation. As I was walking around the perimeterof the square, I heard some singing. Following the sound, I peered into thesmall Catholic church on the corner and discovered a young peoples choirrehearsing for what a poster on the next block informed me was a forthcom-ing town festival in honor of St. Peter.

Many aspects of this experience struck me forcibly, particularly thesense of order, tranquility, and human connection based on years of mutualfamiliarity, stable social patterns, and shared experience. I was not surprisedto learn subsequently that about half of all young people born in Portuguesesmall towns choose to remain there throughout their adult livesa farhigher percentage than for small-town youth in any other nation of westernEurope.

Benders examples of community (and my own) are place-based. But it isimportant not to build place, or face-to-face relationships, into the definitionof community. To do this would be to resolve by fiat, in the negative, the rela-tionship between community and the Internet. Instead, I suggest that we focuson the four key structural features of community implied by Bendersaccountlimited membership, shared norms, affective ties, and a sense ofmutual obligationand investigate, as empirical questions, their relationshipto computer-mediated communication.

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Limited Membership

Although technical restrictions do exist and are sometimes employed, a typicalfeature of on-line groups is weak control over the admission of new participants.Anecdotal evidence suggests that many founding members of on-line groupsexperience the rapid influx of newer members as a loss of intimacy and dilutionof the qualities that initially made their corner of cyberspace attractive. Somebreak away and start new groups in an effort to recapture the original experience.

Weak control over membership is not confined to electronic groups, ofcourse. Up to the early 1840s, for example, Boston was conspicuous amongAmerican cities for the relative stability and homogeneity of its population,which contributed to what outside observers saw as the communitarian inti-macy and solidarity of Boston society. And then, in the single year of 1847,more than thirty-seven thousand immigrants arrived in a city of fewer than115,000. By the mid-1850s, more than one third of Bostons population wasIrish. Boston was riven, and the consequences persisted for more than a cen-tury. Many kinds of groups can undergo rapid changes of membership, butthey may respond differently.10

In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman distinguishes between twokinds of responsesexit and voiceto discontent within organizations. Exitis the act of shifting membership to new organizations that better meet needs,while voice is the effort to alter the character of existing organizations. Exitis, broadly speaking, marketlike behavior, while voice is political.

A hypothesis: when barriers to leaving old groups and joining new ones arerelatively low, exit will tend to be the preferred option; as these costs rise, theexercise of voice becomes more likely. Because it is a structural feature of moston-line groups that border crossings are cheap, exit will be the predominantresponse to dissatisfaction. If so, it is unlikely that on-line groups will serve assignificant training grounds for the exercise of voicea traditional function ofTocquevillean associations. In Boston, by contrast, because the perceived costof exit was high, the Brahmins stayed, struggled, and ultimately worked out amodus vivendi with their Irish neighborsa process that took over a hundredyears. The mutual accommodation of the two groups helped develop one of thiscountrys richest political traditions. In a diverse democratic society, politicsrequires the ability to deliberate, and compromise, with individuals unlike one-self. When we find ourselves living cheek by jowl with neighbors with whomwe differ but whose propinquity we cannot easily escape, we have powerfulincentives to develop modes of accommodation. On the other hand, the readyavailability of exit tends to produce internally homogeneous groups that maynot communicate with other groups and lack incentives to develop sharedunderstandings across their differences. One of the great problems of contem-porary American society and politics is the proliferation of narrow groups andthe weakening of structures that create incentives for accommodation. It is hardto see how the multiplication of on-line groups will improve this situation.

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Shared Norms

A different picture emerges when we turn our attention from intergroup com-munication to the internal life of on-line groups. Some case studies suggestthat on-line groups can develop complex systems of internalized norms. Thesenorms arise in response to three kinds of imperatives: promoting shared pur-poses, safeguarding the quality of group discussion, and managing scarceresources in what can be conceptualized as a virtual commons. As ElinorOstrom has argued, the problem of regulating a commons for collective advan-tage can be solved through a wide range of institutional arrangements otherthan private property rights or coercive central authority. Internet groups relyto an unusual degree on norms that evolve through iteration over time and areenforced through moral suasion and group disapproval of conspicuous viola-tors. This suggests that, despite the anarcho-libertarianism frequently attrib-uted to Internet users, the medium is capable of promoting a kind ofsocialization and moral learning through mutual adjustment.11

I know of no systematic research exploring these moral effects of groupon-line activities and their consequences (if any) for off-line social and politi-cal behavior. One obvious hypothesis is that to the extent that young on-lineusers come to regard the internal structure of their groups as models for off-line social and political groups, they will be drawn to (or demand) more par-ticipatory organizations whose norms are enforced consensually and informally.If so, it would be important to determine the extent to which this structurereflects the special imperatives of organizations where barriers to entrance andexit are low. The ideal of voluntary community reinforced by the Internet islikely to run up against the coercive requisites of majoritarian politics.

Affective Ties

Proponents of computer-mediated communication as the source of new com-munities focus on the development of affective ties among on-line group mem-bers. Thus, Howard Rheingold, while acknowledging concerns that peopleinteracting on-line lack the genuine personal commitments to one another thatform the bedrock of genuine community, insists that cyberculture can overcomethis limitation. He defines virtual communities as social aggregations thatemerge from the Net when enough people carry on . . . public discussions longenough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships.12

Here, the crucial empirical question is the relationship between face-to-face communication (or its absence) and the development of affective ties.How important are visual and tonal cues? How important is it to have someway of comparing words and deeds? Heres one hypothesis: it is impossibleto create ties of depth and significance between A and B without each beingable to assess the purposes and dispositions that underlie the others verbalcommunications. Is the interlocutor sincere or duplicitous? Does he really

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care about me, or is he merely manipulating my desire for connection toachieve (unstated) purposes of his own? Is the overall persona an interlocu-tor presents to me genuine or constructed? We all rely on a range of nonver-bal evidence to reduce (if never quite eliminate) our qualms about othersmotivations and identities.

Internet enthusiasts respond to these questions by deconstructing the idealof face-to-face communication. They point out (correctly) that duplicity andmanipulation have been enduring facts of human history and that the adventof computer-mediated communication raises at most questions of degree ratherthan kind. I must confess that I come away unconvinced. Considerable evi-dence suggests that the Internet facilitates the invention of on-line personali-ties at odds with off-line realities and that the ability to simulate identities isone of its most attractive features for many users (gender-bending is said to beespecially popular). But the playful exercise of the imagination, whatever itsintrinsic merits and charms, is not readily compatible with the developmentof meaningful affective ties. (Devotees of what might be called postmodernpsychology, with its emphasis on social construction and bricolage and rejec-tion of the distinction between surface and depth, might want to quarrel withthis. So be it. I see no way of discussing affective ties without invoking somedistinction between genuine and spurious emotions and identities.)

Another hotly debated issue is the relationship between computer-mediatedcommunication and the tendency to express strong sentiments in antisocial ways.Some researchers have argued that, because the absence of visual and tonal cuesmakes it more difficult to see the pain words can inflict, the Internet reducesrestraints on verbal behavior and invites individuals to communicate in impul-sive ways. (An analogy would be the asserted desensitizing effects of high-altitudebombing.) Other researchers argue that it is precisely the absence of traditionalcues that promotes the formation of social norms for Internet speech and thatthere is no evidence that this speech is more antisocial on average than is face-to-face communication. Given the fragmentary evidence, I see no way of resolv-ing this debate right now.

Mutual Obligation

The final dimension of community to be considered here is the developmentof a sense of mutual obligation among members. Recall John Winthropsfamous depiction of the communal ideal aboard the Arbella: We must enter-tain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselvesof our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities. . . . We must delightin each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourntogether, labor and suffer together.

This may seem too demanding, but at the very least community requiressome heightened identification with other members that engenders a willing-ness to sacrifice on their behalf. Technology critic Neil Postman argues that

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whatever may be the case with norms and emotions, theres no evidence thatparticipants in on-line groups develop a meaningful sense of reciprocal respon-sibility or mutual obligation. Groups formed out of common interests need notdevelop obligations because by definition the interest of each individual isserved by participating in the group. (If that ceases to be the case, it is almostcostless to leave the group.) The problem is that bonds created by interests(in either sense of the term) provide no basis for the surrender of intereststhat is, for sacrifice.13

I find it intriguing that many defenders of on-line groups concede Post-mans factual premise but deny its normative relevance. Nessim Watson, forexample, argues that communities characterized by a strong sense of mutualobligation have virtually disappeared in contemporary America; to single outon-line groups for criticism on this score is both unfair and an exercise in nos-talgia. Efforts to resuscitate the obsolescent idea of mutual obligation are likelyto prove counterproductive: Those who champion Postmans noble metaphorof community as common obligation are most often faced with the task ofdragging other community members kicking and screaming into their part ofthe obligation. Attempts to construct community usually result in the increasedfrustration of organizers and the increased cynicism of participants toward theentire idea of community.14

In late-twentieth-century America, Watson concludes, there is no alterna-tive to voluntary community based on perceptions of individual interest; wewill have to get along as best we can without antique norms and practices ofsacrifice and mutual obligation.

I very much doubt that our societyor any societycan indefinitely dowithout these civic virtues. The question of whether emerging forms of groupactivity help foster these virtues or reinforce their absence is likely to prove sig-nificant for the future.

Conclusion

I conclude by restating what appears to me to be the central question. ManyAmericans today are looking for ways of reconciling powerful but often con-flicting desires for autonomy and connection. The idea of voluntary commu-nity draws its appeal from that quest: if we are linked to others by choice ratherthan by accident, if our interaction with them is shaped by mutual adjustmentrather than by hierarchical authority, and if we can set aside these bonds when-ever they clash with our individual interests, then the lamb of connection canlie down with the lion of autonomy. On-line groups are paradigmatic exam-ples of voluntary communitywhence the enthusiasm they have aroused inmany quarters. It is far too early to know what kinds of effects such groups willhave over time on the relations between individuals and communities in Amer-ica. But three kinds of structural doubts can be raised about the civic conse-quences of voluntary communities. Because they emphasize exit as a response

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to discontent and dissatisfaction, they do not promote the development ofvoice; because they emphasize personal choice, they do not acknowledge theneed for authority; because they are brought together and held together byconverging individual interests, they neither foster mutual obligation nor laythe basis for sacrifice.

In todays cultural climate, the response to these doubts is obvious: any-thing less than voluntary community will trap individuals in webs of oppres-sive relations. And what could be worse than that? My answer: learning tomake the best of circumstances one has not chosen is part of what it means tobe a good citizen and a mature human being. We should not organize our livesaround the fantasy that entrance and exit can always be cost-free. On-linegroups can fulfill important emotional and utilitarian needs. But they must notbe taken as comprehensive models of a future society.

Notes

1. Ehrenhalt, E. The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the1950s. New York: Basic Books, 1995.2. Marvin, C. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Communications in the Late Nine-

teenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 77.3. Yankelovich, D. How Changes in the Economy Are Reshaping American Values. In T.

Mann and T. Taylor (eds.), Values and Public Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brooking Institution Press,1994.4. Friedman, L. The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1990. Wolfe, A., One Nation After All. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. See alsoPutnam, R., Bowling Alone: Americas Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy, 1995, 6(1).5. Wolfe, 1998, p. 132.6. Cited in Jones, S., Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. London, U.K.:

Sage, 1997.7. Snyder, J. Get Real. Internet World, 1996, 7(2), pp. 9294.8. Bender, T. Community and Social Change in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1982, pp. 78.9. Bender, 1982, p. 99.

10. Goodwin, D. K. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga. New York: St. MartinsPress, 1987.11. Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cam-bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.12. Cited in Jones, 1997, p. 24, 121.13. Postman, N. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books,1993.14. Cited in Jones, 1997.

William A. Galston is director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the Uni-versity of Maryland, College Park.

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