“Surfing Alone”: Internet Communities, Public Opinion, and Civic Participation by Frank Louis Rusciano

These results illustrate the differences between the traditional and online communitarians. With respect to social trust, racial tolerance, civic participation, and political participation, one of three results occurred:

Similarly, traditional communitarians appeared to display lower levels of anomie than online communitarians.

Fears that "surfing alone" depresses social trust, tolerance, and civic and political participation relative to the traditional community do appear, then, to be somewhat justified. Further, online communitarians seem more susceptible to the feelings of anomie that are related to isolation from the public sphere. Indeed, these results suggest that "surfing alone" has two negative effects: First, it appears to reduce the social capital that prompts engagement in civil society. Second, to the extent that it serves as a substitute for traditional forms of community based around friends and neighborhood, it eliminates the positive effects of these forms of social organization. Online communities are not merely poor reflections of traditional communities; they are different entities with deleterious effects upon social capital.

The internet clearly poses a potential threat to social capital in postmodern societies. While its potential for grassroots organization on a global level can be encouraging, its ability to create "cyber-communities" that substitute for traditional community ties appears to fail when it comes to civic participation. The 'net, which can theoretically be a liberating tool that puts individuals in contact with more diverse populations and opinions, is being used by a specific group of individuals to isolate themselves from civic engagement.

It is hard to resist speculation about this group, most notably concerning their motivations and why the internet appears to serve and reinforce their attitudes and behavior. One surprising finding of this study was the racial composition of the online community, with blacks and Hispanics tending to have higher scores than whites on the online community scale. Since so much publicity has been given to the image (or perhaps the stereotype) of the angry, displaced white male, it is necessary to note that other racial groups are proportionately more likely to seek an ethnic community online, and that gender does not correlate with this activity.

We should not abandon this image entirely, though. It is true that black and Hispanic respondents were more likely to appear in this group in proportion to their ages in the sample population. However, of the 8,478 respondents who answered the two questions on the online community scale, 13 percent (1,066) fell into the top category; of these, 61 percent were white, 22 percent were black, and 10 percent were Hispanic. Due in part to their large presence in the sample, white respondents still dominated the online communitarians.

Given that different racial groups are unlikely to join with each other if they seek links to their own ethnic groups online, these findings only suggest that the balkanization of American society, and its resulting decrease in civic participation, is more widespread than suspected earlier. In addition, the nature of the internet makes it likely that those who seek an online community with their own ethnic group will find sites that cater to their tastes, including many that depend upon negative, or even hateful, depictions of individuals who do not share their background.