Putnam's Impact Of The Internet On Social Capital

communicate and socialize. While the telephone certainly resulted in an increased number of calls, Putnam argues that these connections remained limited to our already developed social network, and that as a result we only sought to enhance already developed links rather than to develop new ones. This assertion leads one to consider the merits of a few strong connections versus a variety of weak ones. Thus, although the value of a few strong connections versus that of many weak ones is central to Putnam’s argument, he fails to address it. The final and perhaps most interesting commentary provided by Putnam on the advent of telecommunications is his warning that those who seek to speculate about the impact of the internet on …show more content…
The twenty-first century would be characterized by an expansion of the internet into so many arenas that for him to have tried to predict its course correctly would have been impossible if not misguided. However no matter how merited Putnam’s unwillingness to speculate about the long-term impact of the internet was, he simply spends insufficient time discussing the topic. Even at the time of the publication of this book the internet was clearly a revolutionary new technology whose impact would undoubtedly create conversation about social capital and its relevancy to his work. While social media would not come into the prominence until after the publication of Bowling Alone, many of the forms of communication that characterize internet usage even today, such as email, chat rooms, and content-specific discussion lists, are significantly understudied. It is true that Putnam spends time discussing the use of email in workplace settings, it is important to recognize that there is a difference between internet usage for traditional communication versus how it is now used today. While many use email as a means to communicate in more formal settings, and it has to some degree contributed to our social connectivity an area of tremendous interest should be how social media has come to redefine the way in which we make and maintain our “formal and …show more content…
In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, “Between February 2005 and August 2006, the use of social networking sites among young adult internet users ages 18-29 jumped from 9% to 49%. “ The dimension of this growth highlights the demand for research on the links between social media and social capital. It is statistics like this one that demonstrate the need for more research on the links between social media and social capitol. With the expansion of social media across the country the presence of social networking online only continues to become more intertwined with our day-to-day lives. Given the prevalence of these sites among young people it seems reasonable to assume that there might be other means through which young people are building social capitol that go equally unrecognized in the