applied here. Although the spirit of the Women’s Institute, Cub Scouts and working men’s clubs seemed relatively intact, levels of social trust, a key measure of community health, had fallen dramatically. Research showed the proportion of British people who thought ‘most people can be trusted’, as opposed to ‘you can’t be too careful in dealing with people’, had fallen from 44 per cent to 30 per cent in just five years — a more rapid decline even than in the United States.
Just as these figures were being digested, a government policy team investigating neighbourhood renewal reported how in some areas trust in neighbours has all but disappeared — ‘residents described one area as a war zone’. Suddenly social capital was the mantra of Whitehall. The Education Secretary David Blunkett beseeched Britain to ‘build up reservoirs’ of the stuff. The Chancellor Gordon Brown thought the answer was an era of civic patriotism. The question of whether the rapidly expanding Internet was good or bad for community cohesion took on a new urgency.
In spring 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair invited Putnam to breakfast in Downing Street. Over coffee and croissants, he listened as the Harvard academic explained how declining social capital was linked to rising crime, chronic illness and early death; how important face-to-face human interaction, community involvement and trust were for social well-being; how critical it was to ensure that developments like the Internet did not further weaken the bonds and bridges that are required for a healthy society.
At the same time, news from Canada was presenting a different picture. Rather than destroying social capital by replacing face-to-face contact, the experience of ‘Netville’ suggested the Internet might actually strengthen community cohesion and increase neighbourliness. Netville was the nickname of a middle-class Toronto suburb that possessed qualities social network analysts can usually only dream of. All the homes in the development had been offered high-speed Internet access: two thirds of the community had opted to receive the service and a third had declined. The scientists could compare the sociability of those with and without the Internet.
‘Wired’ residents were soon emailing each other, asking for advice, advertising garage sales and sending invitations to community barbecues. There were echoes of what happened in Islington’s Internet Street, but in Netville it was possible to see whether neighbours who weren’t linked to the web were more or less involved in the life of the community.
The results were intriguing: on average, wired residents knew the names of twenty-five neighbours, while non-wired residents knew the names of eight; wired residents talked to twice as many local people as non-wired and made 50 per cent more visits to their neighbours’ homes. The research team also noticed an unexpected difference in the behaviour of the largely online community of Netville compared with people on housing developments nearby. ‘Despite the fact that many homes within Netville were built with spacious patios attached at the rear of the home, the majority of residents had moved a park bench, or a set of inexpensive plastic chairs, to the corner of their driveway or front steps. By contrast, residents of similar nearby developments almost universally chose to sit in their backyards.’
Why had Netvillers acted in this way? When the researchers asked people they explained that by positioning themselves on the front step, they were able to exchange quick greetings with neighbours passing on the street. They could see what was happening in the community, and they were able to keep a watchful eye on their children’s activities.
The authors of the Netville study, Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, dismissed the doom-mongers who feared the web would crush social spirit: ‘Warnings of the Internet’s impending destruction of community have rarely been encumbered by evidence,’ they noted drily. But their report also warned against exaggerating the social implications of computer technology, reminding readers that people interact through atoms and molecules as well as through bits and bytes. Netville was a harbinger of ‘glocalization’, they said, ‘simultaneously globally connected and locally involved.’
Wellman and Hampton concluded that the Internet wouldn’t destroy or transform community, but by offering an additional form of communication, it did have the capability to enrich and empower wired neighbourhoods. Their concern was for people who didn’t have access, those people on the wrong side of the digital divide. ‘What will the Internet do for community then?’ they asked.
The British government was already growing anxious about the significant minority of citizens who were not on the web — less because of concerns over neighbourliness than the risk of missing out on the economic advantages promised by e-government: citizens accessing state services, paying taxes, shopping, banking, finding jobs or training online. For Tony Blair, what he called ‘electronic service delivery’ was a key plank of his public service reforms. ‘I am determined that we should capitalise on these opportunities and that by 2005 at the latest, all government services will be online. Equally important is that by the same time, everyone should have access to the Internet, so that the whole of society can benefit,’ he wrote.
Blair had set the clock ticking: within five years, everyone should have access to the wonders of cyberspace, the man had said. But how were they going to do that, especially in places already suffering the consequences of social exclusion? Ten million pounds was assigned for the Wired Up Communities Programme (WuC), in which residents in some of Britain’s most run-down and poor neighbourhoods, places with negligible Internet access, would be given free computers and invited to cross the electronic frontier.
Ministers had, perhaps, read about Islington’s Internet Street and hoped they could have the same results in an old mining village in South Yorkshire, a Suffolk market town, one of Liverpool’s most deprived districts, a sheep- farming community in Cumbria and on tough estates in east London and Greater Manchester. When the results were sent to Whitehall, the evaluation made unhappy reading. The authors reported major implementation slippage and uncertainty in relation to the aims of the programme, as ministers fussed and argued over what the pilot projects were trying to do. The scheme was described as experimental — basically, it seems, people were making it up as they went along. A couple of the deprived neighbourhoods didn’t get shiny new computers but were given recycled PCs, second-hand machines that were so unreliable they eventually had to be junked.
Plans for local community websites to improve social cohesion proved problematic, with three neighbourhoods becoming ‘disenchanted with the experience’. When the evaluation team asked locals whether the exercise had improved neighbourliness, their report admitted it was ‘difficult to get a sense of connectedness’ in the area.
Most troubling of all, though, was the finding that, despite being given free home computers, the local projects were unable to convince a significant minority of residents of the value of using the Internet. More than a quarter of people given the technology never used it to access the web, with many of those simply saying they weren’t interested or had better things to do with their time. Even when residents were given personal training, indifference remained at roughly the same level.
This lack of interest was not what ministers had expected. As the evaluation put it: ‘Much of the literature assumes that once people have access to, and have used the technologies, they will embrace them wholeheartedly.’ Tony Blair’s ambition to get everyone surfing away within five years was based on a belief that the meteoric growth of the Internet would continue, and the job of government was simply to help people aboard. The evidence, however, pointed to a problem: with quite a lot of British citizens apparently happy to be on the wrong side of the digital divide, new technology might serve to increase inequality and social isolation.
Another study into Internet access in London reported the same difficulty: ‘A lack of interest amongst those not connected is probably the most significant problem facing policymakers.’ The capital’s politicians were warned that the number of non-users with ‘no interest’ remained stubbornly high and, with a slightly desperate tone, the report added, ‘Non-users must be convinced.’
The relationship between new technologies and established communities has often proved unpredictable. The telephone was developed as a business tool but transformed social relations. Radio was designed for the military but inspired a youth revolution. For half a century, mass-produced cars were the playthings of the wealthy, widening the social advantage of the rich over the poor. But with ownership suddenly spreading across the social strata in the 1960s, its impact eroded traditional community life. When televisions were first plugged into people’s homes, the expectation was that they might bind nations together through shared events like the Coronation. Later, the TV would be blamed for seeing us staring at
Perhaps the development of the railway network in the mid-nineteenth century offers the closest analogy to the growth of the Internet. As trains began steaming into public view, there was considerable opposition to using them — particularly from the ‘common people’. In 1837, for example, the architect and journalist George Godwin published a pamphlet entitled ‘An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of Railways’, in which he quoted one common
