An e-neighborhood

On a lazy Sunday afternoon last July, kSupra launched an e-mail into cyberspace that would startle his neighbors in Marshfield and beyond. He was a local high school student, he typed under his online moniker, recovering from an addiction to drugs.

"u can get what ever u want and how much u want when u want," he wrote on the Marshfield Forum, an unofficial community message board. "i struggle all day everyday to stay clean."

Six months and scores of messages later, the conversation that he sparked continues, crossing the virtual divide and bringing together community members in the flesh. They hugged kSupra's parents when he returned to rehab. They started a support group for other parents struggling with the same issues. And they began to know the neighbors they had never met.

"If the forum didn't exist, this wouldn't be happening," said Stephen Whitmore, a technology projects manager from Quincy who helped form the group. "It makes you feel good, like you're actually connecting to the people that need to be in your life."

As professors and politicians mourn the nation's lost sense of community, where working parents are too busy to chat with neighbors across the fence, witness the online community message board. The Internet may be revolutionary for linking people from different time zones and cultures, but it can also introduce the guy across the street.

"We're often not at home, or if we're at home, we're inside our houses," said Deborah Bier, moderator of a Concord online message board that has seen nearly 20,000 postings in the past six years. "We often have garden services. We don't mow our lawns. We don't have that familiarity with our neighbors. This is our over-the-fence."

In a project called E-neighbors, an MIT professor is studying the way similar kinds of technology are changing four communities in the Boston area. Keith N. Hampton's previous research suggests that technology can actually bolster the social ties of neighborhoods, introducing residents and helping them organize to solve local problems.

"We're finding things like they're recognizing more of their neighbors," Hampton said about his current project, which will be concluded this spring. "They're talking to more of their neighbors."

The exception, he has found, plays out in communities where there was already little interaction between residents; if neighbors do not want to meet each other, technology will not change their minds. But in other neighborhoods, especially those where families are raising children, technology can link neighbors, he said.

Hampton is watching groups of 200 to 300 households in four established neighborhoods: an apartment building in Boston and three suburban neighborhoods, including a gated community. He gave the residents access to relatively simple Internet resources, such as neighborhood e-mail lists and neighborhood directories, where residents can post pictures or information about themselves.

This spring, Hampton plans to launch a national project called i-neighbor, where anybody can sign on to bring the same kinds of Internet resources to their own community. He believes that sticking to smaller groups helps avoid problems, such as nasty postings and personal attacks, that have plagued some message boards.

"It tends to create a more civil discourse," Hampton said. "There's less flaming; there's less neighbors getting angry at each other."

Bier, who moderates the Concord message board, said she sometimes resorts to her skills as a therapist to work through testy patches. And knowing that people you know are reading your postings, she added, gives message writers another incentive to be civil.

"I don't want to be a complete jerk in front of the chief of police," she said.

Although Bier has lived in Concord for more than two decades, she has met more of her neighbors in the six years since she started chatting with them online -- and meeting some for a weekly coffee at a local French restaurant -- than the previous 15 years.

The postings in Concord and elsewhere vary as much as any conversation, from food to politics to weather to big ideas. "Anybody have a recommendation for an excellent vet?" one Concord writer asked a few weeks ago. In poured dozens of suggestions -- and a few cautionary tales.

On the Marshfield Forum last week, one writer prompted a continuing debate by musing: "i see way too much racial and sexist jokes being tossed around in [Marshfield High School]. how do we make people see that theres more than one color in marshfield?"

In Arlington, the message board recently helped organize residents who were angry over the firing of a town employee. After dozens of messages on the topic popped up each day, residents packed a selectmen's meeting where the topic was discussed.

For people who have conversed only electronically, meeting face-to-face can shatter mental images of the person behind the online handle. Linda Guttman had posted messages for several years on the Arlington list, which now has more than 1,000 subscribers, before the group began hosting monthly dinners.

"What I really loved about that was after all these years of seeing names on the list and not knowing is this a 20-year-old or is this a 70-year-old?" said Guttman, who now organizes the dinners. "Does this person rent or own? I didn't know [this person] had kids. It never came up."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.