Press/Politics 7(3) Summer 2002Norris / Editorial Editorial The Bridging and Bonding Role of Online Communities

A long tradition in sociological theory among writers such as Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Tonnies, and Simmel has been concerned about the loss of community and the weakening of the face-to-face relations of Gemeinschaft, a theme revived recently in the work of Robert Putnam (2000). Contemporary debates about social capital have noted that many local networks and associations strengthen social cohesion, but another, darker, downside exists in community life (Portess and Landholt 1996; Edwards and Foley 1998). To understand this phenomenon, Putnam (2000, 2002) has drawn an important distinction between bridging groups that function to bring together disparate members of the community, exemplified by mixed-race youth sports clubs in South Africa or the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland, and bonding groups that reinforce close-knit net-works among people sharing similar backgrounds and beliefs. In Putnam’s (2000) words, Bridging social capital refers to social networks that bring together people of dif-ferent sorts, and bonding social capital brings together people of a similar sort. This is an important distinction because the externalities of groups that are bridg-ing are likely to be positive, while networks that are bonding (limited within par-ticular social niches) are at greater risk of producing externalities that are negative. This conceptual distinction should be seen as a continuum rather than a dichot-omy, since in practice many groups serve both bridging and bonding functions, but networks can be classified as falling closer to one end of this spectrum or the other. Heterogeneous local associations (such as parent-teacher associations and the Red Cross) are believed to have beneficial consequences for building social capital, generating interpersonal trust, and reinforcing community ties