ABSTRACT
AUTHORS’ NOTE: We thank Joshua Meyrowitz, Mark Poster, and Robert Putnam for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Correspondence: James E.Katz, School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-1071; email: jimkatz@scils.rutgers.edu
Communication Yearbook 28, pp. 315-371
ommunity as an intellectual construct and as a component of social life has long commanded interest among social scientists and philosophers in general, and communication scholars in particular, as the other chapters in this volume amply
demonstrate. Here we wish to highlight how mediated technologies have affected, and are likely to affect, our notions and experiences of community. Our focus is not mass media such as radio, newspapers, and TV, but rather mediated personal communication technology. By mediated personal communication technology, we refer especially to the mobile phone and the Internet, but also include in our definition (though cannot say much about them in our analysis) Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and civilian band (CB) and similar radio technology. All these are individual-to-individual or individual-to-group technologies, as opposed to mass media, which can be thought of as organization-to-mass communication technologies. The mediated communication perspective has much to offer because, for instance, mobile phones now outnumber TV sets, and Internet usage has become a major activity for millions around the globe. Even those who are illiterate find themselves relying on mobile phones for important communication, especially in developing countries (Katz & Aakhus, 2002).
