More support for the theory that being virtually connected leads to being really connected. Keith Hampton, assistant professor of technology, urban and community sociology at MIT, is interviewed on his reasearch regarding wired middle class communities:

Laurie Smith-Frailey

[from Being Wired Encourages Human Contact ]

Seven years ago, Hampton set out to discover how online communication vehicles like e-mail are likely to impact our social contacts with family, close friends, and casual acquaintances. Are we going to meet less frequently in person? Are we going to become cut off from our communities? He also wanted to learn the extent to which global communication technologies can affect us at the local level — particularly within our own neighborhoods.

The big findings, he says, are that contact leads to contact. "If we have contact online, we'll have more contact offline, and the opposite tends to be true as well," Hampton says. "People generally don't use just one medium or the other, and e-mail certainly doesn't lead to a decrease in the size of our social circles. In fact, communicating on the Internet can increase our interactions by affording new types of relationships, for example, by helping us get to know our neighbors when we otherwise might never have."

At first neightbors in the studies (Boston and Toronto) emailed for recommendations ("anyone know a good plumber") and then got into talking politics. Turns out talking about politics *is* politics, so that led to political action.

Some of the quantitative information will directly inform my presentation next week on The Third Space. Oldenburg's notion of the third place is the great little place around the corner you go to, to have a coffee or a beer with the rgulars, and shoot the shit. Its not work, and it's not home: it's a third place. Third places are on the decline, as people watch more and more TV. However, there is hope: the Web creates a Third Space, where people can meet, and create those weak ties that make life a richer and more diverse place, where we can let off steam, argue about the local politics or sports, and make sense of the world.

In a twist, it also turns out that more in-person and telephone contact is taking place in neighborhoods than before the project began (and more than in a control neighborhood). The difference has been e-mail.

"We're finding some interesting things," he says. "For example, 39 percent of participants in the suburban field site reported sending a personal e-mail to a neighbor they didn't know before, simply as a result of having the e-mail address available to them; 41 percent met someone in person whom they did not know before e-mailing them; and 20 percent said they talked on the telephone with a neighbor they'd not spoken with before.

"Internet use glocalized social relationships," he continues. "That is, it affords local activities using a global communication technology. Email is just an everyday part of everyday life. In our experimental settings, it is an opportunity for social interaction where none existed before."

So the social tool allows us to socialize at a low cost, with low social friction. This leads to increased use of more personal and intrusive media -- phone and face-to-face, and ultimately, a richer local social experience.

[pointer from Marc Eisenstadt]