COMMUNITYboth geographic and social distance. Although the
community ‘‘liberated’’ argument preceeded the
development of the Internet and cyberspace
‘‘chatrooms’’ by decades, it emphasizes the role of
communication technology in the creation of such
future manifestations of community and in that
sense was strikingly prophetic.
Despite the fact that the decline of community
or the community ‘‘lost’’ perspective continues to
hold broad appeal (e.g., Robert Putnam’s ‘‘The
Strange Disappearance of Civic America,’’ The
American Prospect, Winter, 1996), the empirical
evidence for a real decline in community is far
from conclusive. A time trend analysis of national
surveys concerning the persistence of community
in American society by Avery Guest and Susan
Wierzbicki (1999) suggests that while traditional
intra-neighborhood forms of socializing have slow-
ly declined over the past two decades, they have
been largely replaced by communal ties outside
the local neighborhood. Moreover, Guest and
Wierzbicki’s findings also suggest that spatial ‘‘with-
in neigborhood’’ communal ties continue to be
important to a large segment of the population.
Their findings imply that the major questions
about the place of community in mass society
should not be about whether communal forms of
relationships will continue to exist, but rather
under what conditions and in what form.
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