Does the Internet Strengthen Community?

Abstract

Suppose that in the summer of 1952, someone had organized a conference on the social consequences of television. The participants would have faced two crucial problems. First, social reality was moving faster than empirical scholarship. Television was diffusing at an explosive rate, from a relative rarity in the late 1940s to near-ubiquity only a decade later. Scholars in 1952 studying the social effects of television might have noted how neighbors crowded into a living room to watch the only set on the block, and they might have drawn conclusions about the medium’s community-reinforcing tendencies that would have seemed antique only a few years later.