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The background to this book is the pervasive networking of many aspects of civil society and the implications of this technological development for the neighbourhood and the collocated community residing therein. The raison d’etre of the book is the provision of a broadly based interdisciplinary forum in which some of the salient societal and technical issues flowing from this development are presented, discussed and critiqued.

Climbing upwards in this way, one would reach a fork where two streams joined, anda choicehadtobemade.Noreliable information couldbeobtained from the map,andnogeneraloverviewwaspossible toguidethe choice,whichwasbased only on what could be seen within a few yards, or on any general predisposition to go towards the right or the left… Having climbed high up the side of the valley, one would pause and camp for the night… Then it was possible to feel a sense of achievement: to have climbed so high and to be able to look back over the lower country out of which one had come. And it was easy to believe that all the choices, which had been made along the way, were justified by the outcome, and were the only right choices to be made. This self-congratulation might have of course been quite unwarranted. Some other route might have led to still higher ground, and done so more easily. But if so, the knowledge was hidden, and the complacency uncontradicted. (Rosenbrock, 1990, pp. 123–124)

If I had encountered sociologist Barry Wellman and learned about social network analysis when I first wrote about cyberspace cultures, I could have saved us all a decade of debate by calling them “online social networks” instead of “virtual communities”. Social networks predated the Internet, writing and even speech. Indeed, humans are not the only creature that makes use of social networks. I metWellman, author of many social science journal articles about social networks; he had justwritten an insightful paper comparing online social networks to virtual communities. Think of the people you encounter regularly – every month, let us say – your biological family, the people from your job you hang out with, your congregation, service organisation, the people in your neighbourhood who would loan or borrow things, the people you talk with regularly on the telephone in the course of your professional or social activities, the delivery people who show up every day at your business, the people you e-mail regularly.

Community development can be defined broadly as strategies to build local capacity and improve the quality of life in geographic communities. Community informatics is a promising approach for taking advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to further goals of community development. It is important, however, that proponents of this approach recognise that it is based on the assumption that technology in itself can lead to positive social development. This optimistic view of technology’s role in community improvement is subject to various critiques, which can be grouped into three categories: methodological, philosophical and ideological. Reflecting on the implications of these critiques, I propose several recommendations that could serve as an ethical foundation for community informatics. In order to retain the “hope” that ICTs can help lead to greater social, political and economic equity, it is necessary to not succumb to the seductive “hype” that surrounds these technological developments.

When talking about the local community, it is not possible to ignore the influence of the global marketplace and the impact of worldwide networks. Often the global and the local are depicted as being antagonists. Fromcertain perspectives this is clearly the case: globalisation makes local jobs precarious; its disrespect for frontiers tends to steamroller local culture; etc. Taking up arms and opposing globalisation and global networks in the defence of the local community is, to my mind, not a very fruitful strategy. In this text I aim to show that once you have set local knowledge building on the right footing with the measured and appropriate use of such tools as the Internet, you reinforce that community and make the relationship with the rest of the world worthwhile and enriching.When the local community is thriving and healthy, globalisation does not need to be an incurable illness.

Where communal memory is concerned, we have at least three emerging paradigms that help us to understand the linked entities of evolving social memory and the diffusion of communication technologies.

One of the big questions in the early days of Internet research was how the Internet would intersect with community. Scholars and policy makers were curious (and sometimes doubtful) aboutwhether peoplewould successfully carry communitywith them into the online realm, and watchedwith interest as users sought to make connections with people who shared an intellectual or emotional resonance but lacked physical co-presence (e.g. Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1995; Reid, 1999).

Barring the odd beast and monk, just about everyone is connected these days – at most by 6 degrees of interpersonal connection and often by less (Milgram, 1967; Kochen, 1989; Watts, 2003). Yet only a tiny fraction of those who are connected ever interact in any meaningful way as friends, relatives, neighbours, workmates, and acquaintances. These ties comprise our individual personal communities, each a solar system of 10–2000 persons orbiting around us (Wellman, 1979).

People use various modes of communication to maintain their social networks, both local and distant. In the United States, Internet use has been growing steadily, and electronic mail has consistently been the most popular online activity. We investigate the effect of online communication with social ties in the highly networked community of Blacksburg, VA, and surrounding rural Montgomery County. We conducted a random strati- fied household survey to residents in two rounds (2001 and 2002) as part of a larger study on the Internet and community. Our findings provide further evidence that computer networking helps to strengthen and cultivate different types of ties and support within a person’s social network at both the local and distant levels. We found significant differences in online communication based on type of social tie (close, somewhat close, and acquaintances), gender, and type of Internet user (heavy versus light, experienced versus novice). Our findings clearly support claims that overall the Internet is used to support and strengthen sociability and social interaction. This finding also holds for social circles at the local level, suggesting that local community is not undermined by Internet use. Finally, people who use the Internet more heavily (more hours per day) also show more social interaction than people who use the Internet less or not at all.

The increasing convergence of networks with a range of today’s digital media together with assured public access to a global information and communication infrastructure have transformed the character of both personal and social interactions in today’s cyberspace. Given this situation, and in the context of a European research project, we created the socalled Magic Lounge concept in order to investigate the possibilities of having virtual encounters on a future, reliable high-bandwidth, low-cost network infrastructure that would allow combined spoken and text chat exchanges between multiple speakers. Thus, “Magic Lounge” refers to a virtual meeting space where members of geographically dispersed communities can come together to carry out joint meetings and other less formal encounters.