"Surfing Alone": Internet Communities, Public Opinion, and Civic Participation

By Frank Louis Rusciano

A constant threat to the republic lies in the isolated individual, severed from past relationships, unhappy with present circumstances, and pessimistic about the future. This person feels few ties to a community or to the body politic at large, and hence will not invest social capital-the energy to create relationships with others-in a society from which he or she feels alienated or a future that seems uncertain.

Many assumed the internet would help alleviate this threat. By linking individuals to others through an alternative medium, the 'net could provide a means by which social ties and civic involvement might be encouraged. However, unintended consequences have caused the internet to have the opposite effect. The appearance of "cyber-communities" has degraded the traditional notion of community, and actually weakened civic participation.

In his influential 1995 essay "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam argued that the rich associational life previously enjoyed by Americans was being lost. Like many before him, he suggested that social capital was linked with social trust and civic engagement in a society. Without these relationships, individuals would lose a critical means of checking elite power through organization.

What are the effects on public opinion and civic associational life of "surfing alone" on the internet? This study uses data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, produced in 2000 by Putnam's Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, to find out. The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey is comprised of a national sample of 3,000 respondents and representative samples in forty communities nationwide (across twenty-nine states) covering an additional 26,230 respondents. This analysis utilizes the forty community-based samples to attempt to answer four questions:

What relationships exist among the different types of social ties individuals form, and can we define "communities" according to the group ties claimed by respondents?

Do "online communities" differ from the "traditional communities" based upon friendship, neighborhood, or city?

Are there demographic characteristics associated with different forms of community?

Finally, are the different types of community related to measures of civic participation in different ways, and are they also related differently to destructive social forces such as distrust and anomie-a feeling of powerlessness and isolation in the society?

One set of questions from the Saguaro survey attempted to discern the sources of individuals' sense of community by asking respondents to indicate their agreement or disagreement with the following six statements:

Old or new friends give you a sense of community.

People in your neighborhood give you a sense of community.

Living in [your city] gives you a sense of community.

Your place of worship gives you a sense of community.

The people you work with or go to school with give you a sense of community.

People who share your ethnic background give you a sense of community.

People you have met online give you a sense of community.

When the responses to these questions were correlated, the results, indicated that online relationships are different from more traditional group ties. All of the traditional relationships were significantly related with one another; however, respondents who felt a sense of community with people they met online were related only with those who claimed more traditional ties in three out of the six instances: those who obtained a sense of community from their place of worship, those with whom they worked or went to school, and those who shared the same ethnic background.

Further analysis reduced these responses to two sets of self-identified "communities." The "traditional community" included those who derived a sense of community from their friends and neighborhood. The "online community" included those who derived a sense of community from people they had met online or from people who shared their ethnicity. The two communities had different demographic characteristics, many of which went against what we might expect.