Networked Rainie, Lee; Wellman, Barry
MIT Press,
2012, 20120427, 2012-04-00, 2014-02-14, 2019-06-20, 20120101
eBook, Book
Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and ...videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking. Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked , Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. The new social operating system of "networked individualism" liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks. Rainie and Wellman outline the "triple revolution" that has brought on this transformation: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the Internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Drawing on extensive evidence, they examine how the move to networked individualism has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighborhoods; transformed work into less hierarchical, more team-driven enterprises; encouraged individuals to create and share content; and changed the way people obtain information. Rainie and Wellman guide us through the challenges and opportunities of living in the evolving world of networked individuals.
Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community Gruzd, Anatoliy; Wellman, Barry; Takhteyev, Yuri
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
10/2011, Volume:
55, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The notion of “community” has often been caught between concrete social relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the Internet has refocused our attention on this ...ongoing tension. The Internet has enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook, to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.
There is some panic in the United States about a possible decline in social connectivity. The authors used two American national surveys to analyze how changes in the number of friends are related to ...changes in Internet use. The authors found that friendships continue to be abundant among adult Americans between the ages of 25 to 74 and that they grew from 2002 to 2007. This trend is similar among Internet nonusers, light users, moderate users, and heavy users and across communication contexts: offline, virtual only, and migratory from online to offline. Heavy users are particularly active, having the most friends both online and offline. Intracohort change consistently outweighs cohort replacement in explaining overall growth in friendship.
This study is part of the broad debate about the role of distance and technology for interpersonal contact. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that systematically and ...explicitly compares the role of distance in social networks pre- and post-Internet. An analysis is made of the effect of distance on the frequency of e-mail, phone, face-to-face and overall contact in personal networks, and the findings are compared with their pre-Internet counterpart whose data were collected in 1978 in the same East York, Toronto locality. Multilevel models with a spline specification are used to examine the non-linear effects of distance on the frequency of contact. These effects are compared for both very close and somewhat close ties, and for different role relationships: immediate kin, extended kin, friends and neighbours. The results show that e-mail contact is generally insensitive to distance, but tends to increase for transoceanic relationships greater than 3000 miles apart. Face-to-face contact remains strongly related to short distances (within five miles), while distance has little impact on how often people phone each other at the regional level (within 100 miles). The study concludes that e-mail has only somewhat altered the way people maintain their relationships. The frequency of face-to-face contact among socially close friends and relatives has hardly changed between the 1970s and the 2000s, although the frequency of phone contact has slightly increased. Moreover, the sensitivity of these relationships to distance has remained similar, despite the communication opportunities of the Internet and low-cost telephony.
Computer networks are social networks. Social affordances of computer‐supported social networks – broader bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, personalization – are fostering the ...movement from door‐to‐door and place‐to‐place communities to person‐to‐person and role‐to‐role communities. People connect in social networks rather than in communal groups. In‐person and computer‐mediated communication are integrated in communities characterized by personalized networking.
Les réseaux informatiques sont des réseaux sociaux. Les possibilités sociales qu’offrent les réseaux sociaux informatisés – bande passante plus large, portabilité sans fil, connectivité mondiale, personnalisation – sont en train de favoriser le passage de communautés de porte‐à‐porte et de lieu‐à‐lieu vers des communautés d’individu‐à‐individu et de rôle‐à‐rôle. Ainsi, les gens se lient davantage dans des réseaux sociaux que dans des collectivités. Les communications directes et via l’informatique sont intégrées dans des communautés caractérisées par un maillage personnalisé.
Networks, Hacking and Media - CITAMS@30 Barry Wellman, Laura Robinson, Casey Brienza, Wenhong Chen, Shelia R. Cotten / Barry Wellman, Laura Robinson, Casey Brienza, Wenhong Chen, Shelia Cotten
2018, 2018-11-27, Volume:
17
eBook
Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS), this volume celebrates the section's thirtieth anniversary. ...Lead editor Barry Wellman joins forces with former and current CITAMS chairs Wenhong Chen, Shelia Cotten, and Laura Robinson, as well as Casey Brienza, founder of the Media Sociology Preconference, to look back at the history of the section, review some of its most important themes, and set the agenda for future discussion. Alongside its sister volume, The "M" in CITAMS@30: Media Sociology, this valuable book shows the impact CITAMS has had, and continues to have, on academic and public discourse. Featuring leading scholars in the fields of sociology of communication, information technologies and media, it reveals how the section had transcended disciplinary boundaries, and demonstrates how it holds the skills to address some of the biggest challenges of our digital age. It is essential reading for all those interested in both the story of CITAMS to date, and the role it will play in the future.
Discusses personal network analysis as opposed to network analysis, thus analyzing the social network of an individual versus that of the individual's communal association. Divides the subjects into ...two camps, that of the main subject, the ego, and those of the ego's relationships, the alters. Asks whether the relationships themselves or the networks to which they belong are the main points of support for the egos, and to which degree, that understanding may occur regarding which resources and forms of support are given and whether by either family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, etcetera, thus weighing these different alter-types against each other. Questions of methodology and the problems they face are explored -as in the frequency of contact between egos and alters and clusters of alters and the dynamics they play with each other and more so with the ego. Further, considers quantity of alters that the average American has, how often contact is made between each contact, and the number of meaningful alters, vice those that are of a more incidental nature. Briefly mentions use of a so-called 'name generator' in the research, along with asking questions about reciprocity amongst the subjects. Lastly states that the structure of an ego's networks has largely been ignored due to unreliability and time constraints. References. S. Fullmer
Social interaction patterns are relevant to explain (social) travel behavior. As such, the objective of this paper is to comparatively study the factors that influence social interaction frequency ...among social network members with different communication modes. Based on data from seven surveys on social networks, this analysis seeks to shed some light on (i) the similarities and differences in social interaction frequency patterns, (ii) the relation of personal and network characteristics with observed patterns, and (iii) the extent to which these associations are consistent across contexts, in terms of effect direction and magnitude.
A multilevel-multivariate lognormal hurdle model is used to jointly analyze social interaction frequency patterns across all datasets. Level 1 includes information on ego-alter dyad characteristics, level 2 includes ego-level socio-demographic and aggregate social network characteristics, while level 3 includes information specific to each context where data was collected. In line with network capital theory, results show the existence of very consistent associations between social interaction frequency and some network and dyad characteristics such as network size, ego-alter distance, and emotional closeness, which showed some degree of generality irrespective of context. Building up on previous research, results also suggest that the effect of a higher transport cost-to-earnings ratio is more likely to manifest in the tie-formation phase, in such a way that the geographical spread of the network will tend to be smaller, but conditional on such a network distribution, the cost-to-earnings ratio effect becomes negligible. For other variables such as education level, gender and relationship type, effect patterns were less clear, which might be explained by socio-economic, and other contextual factors, as well as methodological differences across studies.
The model presented here can provide average levels of demand for social interactions, which bounded by the geographical distribution of networks, can be used to further understand travel demand in urban environments and transportation systems at the local or regional level.
We review the evidence from a number of surveys in which our NetLab has been involved about the extent to which the Internet is transforming or enhancing community. The studies show that the Internet ...is used for connectivity locally as well as globally, although the nature of its use varies in different countries. Internet use is adding on to other forms of communication, rather than replacing them. Internet use is reinforcing the pre‐existing turn to societies in the developed world that are organized around networked individualism rather than group or local solidarities. The result has important implications for civic involvement.
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