Once upon a time, long, long ago — in 1995 — the internet was seen as something special, available only to wizards and geeks. Now it has become part of everyday life. People routinely integrate the internet into the ways in which they communicate with each other, moving easily between phone, computer, and in-person encounters. With its help, they are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks of core and significant ties even though many of their ties do not live close to them.

But as the internet has become a part of our everyday routine, it has changed our form of community and broadened our social networks. Today, few people inhabit urban villages or rural “Pleasantvilles” where everybody knows their name — and minds their business. Instead, they inhabit socially and spatially dispersed networks through which they maneuver to be sociable, to seek information, and to give and get help.

Barry Wellman (1999, 2001) has shown how this shift from solidary communities to social networks began before the internet. Yet the internet surely has accelerated the change. It has made it easy for people to connect without living nearby and without knowing each other well. It has probably increased the variety of the kinds of people who are network members. Where once communication was confined to neighbors (usually similar in ethnicity and social status), it is now more diversified, bridging multiple social worlds.

The internet — and the cell phone — have also transformed communication from house-to-house to person-to-person. In the past, people went visiting on Sundays or called on each other at home in the evening. Now, they contact each other person-to-person. As Robert Putnam (2000) has shown, households are much less likely than a generation ago to have family dinners or picnics. But this does not mean they are disconnected. Rather, they are connected — as individuals — to friends and relatives and even to other household members (Kennedy and Wellman, 2006). The internet now helps people in maintaining ties with large and diversified networks.

The result is that people not only socialize online, but they incorporate the internet into seeking information, exchanging advice, and making decisions. While not everyone does this, the trend is clear, and our findings show what a great boost the internet is providing to social capital — obtaining resources both from other people and from more institutional web resources. To get such capital, people must act as individual internet entrepreneurs. Americans are in an era where they may have only one or two extremely close relationships, but dozens of core and significant ties. This means rather than relying on a single “community” for information, advice, and resources, people do better when they actively seek out a variety of appropriate people and web resources for different situations. The evidence from the two surveys shows that they are doing this, and that many are using the internet actively for help with crucial and important issues.

Wellman has called this shift away from reliance on a single group “networked individualism.” He and Manuel Castells (2000) have separately argued that it is a profound shift in the fabric of western societies, as organizations outsource, jobs function in fluid teams, marriages are serial, children have multiple parents, and people shift among many roles. Although the shift began before the advent of the internet, our research suggests that the internet both reflects this shift and is enabling and accelerating it.