Michael Delli Carpini responds with some commentary about the papers and their implications. He applauds the papers in format and substance, reminding us that we’re only getting an excerpt of the papers based on the presentations.
For Jiang’s paper, Michael acknoweldges her “important move” in making a distinction between different types of Internet sites, such as the collocated v. distributed diaspora sites she discusses in the paper. As with many empirical studies, the difficulties of self-selection are a limit to what kinds of implications we can make with these data sets. Nonetheless, the conclusion that the real value of building social capital is to connect to a real (physical and virtual) community is important. To really make that case, though, Michael suggests that we should look to collocated web sites and compare that with those who are in the physical community but do not go online.
Michael considers Sunny’s paper in some ways a “poignant” paper about the role of ICTs in trying to maintain the familial solidarity so integral to Chinese culture. It’s an almost ethnographic approach that consequently brings a rich flavor to it. Sunny asks, Michael reminds us, does mobile phones and the Internet bring some kind of solidarity in the face of Chinese society? The suggestion that new ties may be more virtual is convincing to Michael, but he also wonders what’s driving it and what the normative implications are–can you meaningfully look at ties that might in fact be almost exclusively virtual? In the first paper, the most valued use of online community is when they are connected to the physical community; here, the question is what is the value of an almost totally virtual community. Michael thinks it’s an open question.
Michael also considers Weiyu Zhang’s paper a valuable contribution because it demonstrates the characteristics of social networking sites in a helpfully multimethod manner, and learning how ties (especially weak ties) emerge in forming social capital. Issues remain about sampling and direction of causality, but he thinks it’s nonetheless an important contribution about implications of social action.
On a broader scale, Michel again remarks of his interest in CIRC not just about China itself but in a comparative form, too. Sunny Lam’s paper is perhaps the most relevant to this approach, Michael points out to us, because it discusses the social and economic context of new ICTs and familial ties so important in the Chinese culture.
Michael also points out that these papers draw us in about fundamental issues about the Internet more broadly: what it means to have a virtual community, its relationship to immigration and diasporas writ large, differences between relationship- and object-/interest-oriented SNS and how that changes our theorizing about the Internet, the designs and structure of the Internet, how the Internet might lead to new social networks, and the relationship between virtual and physical/geographical communities.
Finally, Michael notes how all of these papers discuss the bridging and bonding of “social capital” (as Putnam has studied it). It leads to a more engaged public and more civic kinds of communities. Michael thinks that the notion of that community is a form of social capital is right. But what is less clear to him whether or not virtual communities may be as “real” as the physical.
Michael makes the additional point that there are different kinds of engagement–civic, civil, or political engagements. Going to church, serving the homeless, and voting are all different kinds of engagement. Michael thinks these papers deal at the level of civil engagements, but he encourages us to think about how these engagements might lead to civic or political engagements: what those links might be in a structural sense. The Lam paper suggests there are economic and social forces at play that are leading to a breakup of familial ties. Michael asks us openly, Is that good? How do we determine that? Agency, at least in a democracy, is supposed to reside in the citizen themselves. He points out that as complex as these questions are, we should not forget the public’s role as well.