In his study of the Black middle class, Landry suggests a conceptual map of decades (table 2). (9) The 1950s was a decade of expanding economics but an absence of reform politics. The 1960s ushered in reform politics on top of economic expansion, and the Black middle class grew and advanced. In the 1970s, reform politics continued but the economy stalled; the Black middle class held steady. The 1980s, with neither an expanding economy nor reform politics, was another decade of relative incremental growth of the Black middle class. This meant that the 1960s saw an unprecedented and short-lived growth of the Black middle class.

Community Context

The 1970s and 1980s also produced unprecedented poverty in the inner cities of the United States. Wilson advances three concepts that sum up changes in the social organization of Black community life during this time: social buffer, social isolation and concentration effect. (10) These concepts capture the crisis facing Black people being marginalized through the birth process of the information society. Wilson states his argument:

As a result, the last quarter of the 20th century gave rise to a new Black middle class and a new-impoverished class.

The old Black middle class contained entrepreneurs, service professionals, and farmers. The new Black middle class has almost no farmers, and the service professionals have become overwhelmingly employed by the state. Over 70% of Black women with college degrees and 50% of Black men with college degree work for government. (12) This process started during Reconstruction after the Civil War, when government employment was the main avenue open to Black upward social mobility. It continues today as affirmative action applies only to employment in the state and in those private firms with government contracts.

While charting the main feature of what he calls the "network society," Castells analyses unprecedented urban poverty on a global scale. He argues that the new impoverishment and social exclusion is a systemic feature of this period.

This widespread, multiform process of social exclusion leads to the constitution of what I call, taking the liberty of a cosmic metaphor, the black information holes of informational capitalism. ... Social exclusion is often expressed in spatial terms. The territorial confinement of systemically worthless populations, disconnected from networks of valuable functions and people, is indeed a major characteristic of the spatial logic of the network society. (13)

Elsewhere, applying this analysis to the United States, he describes the informational city as a dual city. By dual city, I understand an urban system socially and spatially polarized between high value-making groups and functions on the one hand and devalued social groups and downgraded spaces on the other hand. ... The power of new information technologies, however, enhances and deepens features present in the social structure and in power relationships. (14)

In this context we apply the concept of social capital to the inner city African American community. (15) Social capital, contrasted with physical capital (e.g. machines) and human capital (e.g. education), describes the social relationships, expectations, obligations, and norms that facilitate productive human activity. (16) Putnam measured U.S. social capital over the 20th century.

Collecting longitudinal data on American participation in all sorts of organized groups, he found that since roughly 1960 there has been an across the board decline in social capital. His thematic metaphor is that people used to bowl in organized leagues, and now are "bowling alone."

Putnam makes a distinction between bonding social capital, relationships within a group, and bridging social capital, relationships that link a group with others. These two types of social capital together make up the social capital of any given social group.

Bonding social capital is good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity. Dense networks in ethnic enclaves, for example, provide crucial social and psychological support for less fortunate members of the community. ... Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion. ... Moreover bridging social capital can generate broader identities and reciprocity, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrower selves. (17) The distinction between bridging and bonding social capital plays a particular role when a community lacks key resources, for instance, money.

[A]mong the disadvantaged, "bridging" social capital may be the more lucrative form. All told, people in economically disadvantaged areas appear to suffer doubly. They lack the material resources to get ahead, and they lack the social resources that might enable them to amass these material resources. (18)

Discourse

The concept of the public sphere has been debated since its historical exegesis from European intellectual history by Habermas. (19) The pubic sphere is a social ecology for relevant discourse that shapes policy, public opinion, and the dominant intellectual themes of an era.

Dawson critiques Habermas in such a way that we can connect Putnam to our focus on the dual city. (20) Habermas concludes that the public sphere of capitalist society is a bourgeois phenomenon, but Dawson utilizes a concept from feminist theory to argue that the Black community has always had a "subaltern counterpublic" as the social basis for resistance.

An independent Black press, the production and circulation of socially and politically sharp popular music and the Black church have provided institutional bases for the Black counterpublic since the Civil War. (21)

After articulating an analysis of the same economic transformation discussed by Landry, Wilson, and Castells, Dawson states:
“[T]he ideological and political restructuring that accompanied this transformation was decisively accomplished in the 1980s by a number of extraordinary conservative regimes including those of Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan.” (22)

He then asks what continues to be a relevant research question in and after the same period discussed by Landry, Castells, and Wilson:

In sum, our approach to community examines the dual city (Castells) for social capital (Putnam) in the socially isolated Black inner city (Wilson) to produce a Black counterpublic sphere (Dawson) by means of a community technology center.

Social Movements

Morris analyses the institutions that the Black counterpublic relied on during the civil rights movement in a case study of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott movement in the 1950's led by Martin Luther King. (24) He employs an "indigenous perspective" use of resource mobilization theory to define the Black movement:

Resource mobilization theory emphasizes the resources necessary for the initiation and development of movements. They include formal and informal organizations, leaders, money, people, and communication networks. (25)

Landry describes how the Montgomery movement was led by a young middle class minister, Martin Luther King Jr., but was sustained by poor Blacks of the city, domestics, garbage collectors, and unskilled laborers as well as Blacks of other classes. (26)

Landry's data on this broad-based mobilization supports Morris in arguing the primacy of internal resources.

Morris anticipated Putnam's distinction between bonding and bridging social capital.
The basic resources enabling a dominated group to engage in sustained protest are well developed internal social institutions and organizations that provide the community with encompassing communication networks, organized groups, experienced leaders, and social resources, including money, labor, charisma, that can be mobilized to attain collective goals. ... The significance of outside resources, in this view, lies in the help they can give in sustaining movements. However, our evidence suggests that they are not a causal determinant. (27)

Cyberpower

Jordan advances the notion of cyberpower and identifies three interrelated regions of cyberpower, "the individual, the social, and the imaginary." (28) Cyberpower—the effect of online activity on power—can be measured and mapped. We use three definitions of these types of cyberpower:

Jim Walch argues for a research agenda in this area: