The Neighborhood In The Internet

Today, "community" seems to be everywhere. At home, at work, and online, the vague but comforting idea of the community pervades every area of life. But have we lost the ability truly to understand what it means? The Neighborhood in the Internet investigates social and civic effects of community networks on local community, and how community network designs are appropriated and extended by community members. Carroll uses his conceptual model of "community" to re-examine the Blacksburg Electronic Village – the first Web-based community network – applying it to attempts to sustain and enrich contemporary communities through information technology. The book provides an analysis of the role of community in contemporary paradigms for work and other activity mediated by the Internet. It brings to the fore a series of design experiments investigating new approaches to community networking and addresses the future trajectory and importance of community networks. This book will be of interest to students of sociology, community psychology, human-computer interaction, information science, and computer-supported collaborative work.

A comprehensive set of resources, this Handbook provides linkages to established theories of media and politics, political communication, governance, deliberative democracy and social movements, all within an interdisciplinary context. Containing the latest survey data, the contributors form a strong international cast of established and junior scholars.

The Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) at San Jose State University conducted this study to review the issues and implications involved in Using the Internet to Envision Neighborhoods with Transit-Oriented Development Potential. SUMMARY OF PROBLEM: The Using the Internet to Envision Neighborhoods with Transit-Oriented Development Potential project seeks to provide guidelines and examples to facilitate use of the Internet to envision places with transit-oriented development potential, building on the envisioning techniques developed and presented in MTI Report 01-15, "Envisioning Neighborhoods with Transit-Oriented Development Potential."

This text looks at the virtual community of cyberspace and analyzes its relationship to the real one as lived out in today's societies. It shows how the idea of community is being challenged by the increasing power and range of cyberspace.

Are communication technologies ushering in a wondrous new age of computer networks that connect people into worldwide virtual communities of like-minded individuals? Or are global computer networks isolating us from real relationships and from our society, as we stare into a screen instead of interacting face to face? In this eloquent and thoughtful book, Stephen Doheny-Farina explores the nature of cyberspace and the increasing virtualization of everyday life. He occupies a middle ground between these two extreme views of the net, arguing that electronic neighborhoods should be less important than geophysical neighborhoods in all their integrity, and that we must use the new technologies not to escape from our troubled communities but to reinvigorate them. Doheny-Farina offers a critical perspective on virtual reality and its social impact, showing us how people meet and converse on the net, how they teach and learn, and how they establish workplaces that can accompany them wherever they go. Along the way he reveals the advantages and hazards of making the computer the center of our public and private lives. Doheny-Farina argues that once we begin to divorce ourselves from geographic place and start investing ourselves in virtual communities, we further the dissolution of our real, dying communities. He speaks out in favor of a movement called civic networking, which promotes the proliferation of networks that originate locally to organize community information and culture and to foster pride in and responsibility to our neighborhoods.