The Internet Use and Community Involvement in Tehran Iran

Nader Razeghi ,Seyedeh Zeinab Taghavi

This is exploring the impact of the internet on local community involvement in Tehran, Iran. It investigates how the internet changes community involvement and argues that the Internet has created new forms of community involvement instead of local community involvement. This study has employed quantitative research methods. The sample for this research was drawn from the population of Internet users, namely people who accessed and used the Internet in Tehran, Iran. The results of the study indicate that there was no significant correlation between the amount of Internet use and local community involvement. People who spend more time online (high Internet user) do not have a greater local community involvement than people who use Internet less of the time. By contrast in terms of type of Internet use and social capital the study found that people who used the Internet for local news and reading newspapers online were more involved in the local community. The study illustrated that the Internet encourages people to some extent to become involved in the national or global community.