From the Editor: Electronic Presence

A lot of controversy and speculation surrounds Americans' increasing use of the internet and what it might mean to our society. Some worry that time spent by citizens online is time taken away from maintaining the social fabric of civic life—an argument that has been bandied about the polling community with varying degrees of intensity, and even acrimony, since at least February 2000, when Stanford University survey researchers Norman H. Nie and Lutz Erbring announced their finding that "The more hours people use the internet, the less time they spend with real human beings."

Coming not too long after Robert D. Putnam's contention in his essay "Bowling Alone" that civic engagement in America was going the way of the buffalo, largely as the result of technological preoccupations such as television, the Stanford study made quite an impact. Nie told Science News Online that "The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that reduces our participation in communities even more than television did."

This is a debate which, if anything, becomes more relevant as time goes on, and more people gain more and better access to the internet. The April issue of Public Opinion Pros revisits it, with two articles that use the data from Putnam's own Saguaro Seminar to support distinctly different positions on the question.

In "Surfing Alone: Internet Communities, Public Opinion, and Civic Participation," Frank Rusciano sees the internet as clearly posing a threat to postmodern societies, substituting the immediate gratification of "cyber-communities" for the sense of past or future that prompts people to invest their "social capital" in traditional communities. In "Ghosts in the Machine: Media Technology and Social Capital," Brian Jones comes to some startlingly different conclusions in his analysis of the relationship of both internet use and television watching with voluntary association.

Our third feature, "Political Access: The Internet as a Source of Campaign Information," by Kenneth Winneg and Natalie Jomini Stroud, examines the growing importance of the internet in another vital civic arena—campaign politics—by focusing on its use by potential voters during the 2004 Democratic primary campaign

Other articles this month include our offering "From the Field," in which Mark Baldassare describes the experience of polling in California during the governor's recall election and the challenges it posed, and an op-ed by Frederic I. Solop and Kristi K. Hagen, who discuss the continuing disconnect between journalists and the polling community in presenting survey results to the public.

The irony has not escaped me that all these articles and more are available only online, in a magazine that exists only on the internet, brought to you by an editor who works only in cyberspace. I guess you could say I am a bit biased on the question of how much of a blessing the internet is and its ability to contribute to the well-being of our society.

Just how biased was brought home to me last December, when I had a rare opportunity to meet a Public Opinion Pros author in person at a symposium near where I live. After the event, I walked up to him and introduced myself.

"So, you really do exist!" he said. "I thought you were just an electronic presence."

Some might find in such a notion a somewhat disturbing demonstration of the loss of the individual to an isolating technology.

I, on the other hand, knew at that moment that I had finally joined a wider world.