Abstract
The impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on social capital have attracted much scholarly attentions for years; meanwhile, only a small number of research adopting regional communities as analyzing units have appeared in the literature. In the present article, the entire Kobe-city, one of the major cities in Japan, was exhaustively and mutually exclusively divided into 170 elementary school districts, and their regional properties were estimated by using the results of Japanese census, population statistics, and large-scale citizen-surveys conducted by the municipal government since 2005. These properties were then analyzed to examine the impact of the regional Internet usage on social capital. Regional internet usage rates did not have a statistically significant relationship with averaged sizes of residents' neighborhood networks, but they were negatively related to averaged scores of regional community engagement. On the basis of the analyses, implications of the relationships between Internet usage and regional social capital were discussed.
