Notes from: What is a Network Society? (Chapter 2): Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Notes from: Raine, Lee and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

PART I: THE TRIPLE REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 2- THE SOCIAL NETWORK REVOLUTION

The Social Network Revolution (or just Network Revolution) came before the other two Revolutions (Internet and Mobile).

Social network – a set of relations among network members:

• Society is the structures and relations every member is embedded in that provide opportunities, constraints, and coalitions.
• Society is made up of a tangle of networked individuals.
• Networks are specialized, fragmented, sparsely connected, and permeable.

3 factors created technological, social, and economic circumstances to help make the SNR possible (this does not indicate causation):

1. More flexible connectivity.
2. Weakened group boundaries.
3. Information is more directly available resulting in increased personal autonomy.

9 Changes Facilitating Networked Individualism

I. Widespread Connectivity

1. Automobiles and airplanes have made long-distance travel faster and cheaper, helping to expand social networks.

• Automobiles – “Americans are driving more and driving farther in more cars” (page 22).
  • The Interstate Highway System.
  • Cars become more reliable and cheaper commuting becomes routine.
• Airplanes
  • Boeing 707 introduced in 1959.
  • Airline deregulation in late 1970s.
  • By 2005, average American boards a plane 2.5 times per year.

2. Rapid growth of affordable telecommunications and computing makes communicating more powerful and personal.

• 1930s – automation of telephone system locally.
  
• 1960s-70s – automated direct distance dialing – area codes replace operators.
  
• Number of calls and phones increase rapidly from 1950 to 2000.
  
• Landline use declines as mobile phone use and broadband connectivity increase.
  
• Growth of ICTs (information and communication technologies) via the internet and mobile phones.

3. Commercial and social connectedness increase with spread of peace and trade.

• Peace
  • European Union – 27 nation-states.
  • Conflicts still exist (Serbia, Sudan, Myanmar, Libya, Congo), but rarely in developed countries where most residents of developed countries travel.
• Trade
  • Exports double and imports triple since 1970.
  • Products and services more readily available from around the world.

II. Weaker Group Boundaries

4. Family composition, roles, and responsibilities have transferred households from groups to networks.

• Fewer marriages.
  
• Smaller families.
• More women doing paid work.

5. Structured voluntary organizations are being replaced by more informal networks of civil involvement and religious practice.

• Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone”– organization membership and number of active members decreased by half from the 1960s to the mid 1990s.
  
• Religious shift from the 1960s – fewer people going to church and more people engaging in spirituality individually.
  
  • “Nondenominational” and “unaffiliated” have increased, while Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist have decreased.
    
  • Not necessarily becoming less religious - 92% say they believe in “God”.
    

6. Proliferation of mass media outlets and hardware shifts from a common culture to a more fragmented culture.

• Few channels, few television sets per home (1.4 in 1970), no remote – nearly everyone is watching the same thing.
• Hundreds of channels, more television sets per home (2.8 in 2008), remote, recording devices – personalization of viewing options.

III. Increased Personal Autonomy

7. Work is becoming more flexible (manufacturing to white collar and service industry work).

• Pushing atoms to pushing bits.
  
• Move from closely supervised work on assembly lines (blue and pink collar jobs) to loosely supervised, goal-oriented work.
  
• More service sector jobs than manufacturing jobs.

8. America is becoming less bounded by ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.

• Racial intermarriage
  
  • 1967 – racial intermarriage was illegal in 17 states.
    
  • 1980 – 7% of marriages are interracial.
    
  • 2008 – 15% of marriages are interracial (PEW report).
    
• Gender
  
  • Some shifts in attitudes.
    
• Religion
  
  • Protestant-Catholic-Jewish division is no longer a focal point.
    
• Sexual Orientation
  
  • More broadly accepted.
    
  • States starting to allow same-sex marriage and civil unions.
    
  • St. Louis?
    
• Areas where discrimination is worse
  • Anti-immigrant (“do not want a immigrant as a neighbor” – 10% in 1995, 19% in 2006).
  • Anti-Muslim (“do not want a Muslim as a neighbor” – 12% in 1995, 22% in 2006).

9. Decline in defined pension benefits and an increase in independent retirement accounts.

• Shift away from institutionalized employee welfare system.
  
• Individual responsible for taking more active role in retirement savings (401ks, IRAs).
  
• Cafeteria Plans– workers must become more engaged in managing their own health insurance and medical costs.

People are in networks, not groups

• Move away from the individual/group dichotomy to networked individualism.
  
• Group boundaries are blurred, can be difficult to identify group inclusion and exclusion.
  
• Membership is murky and constantly shifting.
  
• A group is a stereotype – a kind of shorthand to describe how we think about our relationships.
  
• Reasons group is used instead of network:
  
  1. Groups are governed by a culture of generalized exchange (many members are both givers and takers).
     
  2. People in power may emphasize “groupiness” to promote compliance to group norms (see Durkheim’s concept of mechanical solidarity).
     
  3. People prefer stability (do not want to acknowledge the transient nature of networks).
     
• What happened when Google thought from a group perspective instead of a network perspective.
  
• We live segmented lives where relationships are compartmentalized and networks overlap.
  
• See Table 2.2 on page 38 for comparison between group-centered society and networked individualism.

People think they act independently, but they are in networks

• Again, moving away from the individual/group dichotomy to networked individualism.
  
• Social reality is relational.
  
• Networks are responsible for our sociability, information, and social capital (Social Capital and Networks article).
  
  • Interlocking board of directorates.
    
• Tiger Woods’ statement of apology after his extramarital affair was made public acknowledged his responsibilities to a network of people instead of only being concerned with his individual desires.
  
• People choose to use alternative medicine when they trust friends and relatives that give specific recommendations (chiropractors).

Thinking Networked

• “Social networks” started being used in the 1950s to cut across the traditional concepts of bounded groups (like families) and social categories (like gender and race).
  
• Better description of social interaction than group behavior because it includes the complexity and shifting boundaries and membership of social interaction.
  
• Clusters and cleavages.
  
• Questions asked from a networked perspective on page 41.
  
  • Christakis and Fowler – people are more likely to be happy when they have close ties to happy people.
    
  • Similar results with depression.
    
• Network phenomena also found in smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, and STDs.

The Social Network Perspective Develops

• Instead of being driven by individual norms of collective group activities, network analysts focus on how people’s connections affect possibilities and constraints in their behavior.
• Study the larger patterns of what people and organizations do and how these patterns fit into society.

Georg Simmel– The Founding Grandfather of Social Networks

• Published his thoughts on networks in “The Metropolis of Mental Life”.
  
• Moves away from dichotomous thinking of groups and individuals (if group solidarity is declining, that does not necessarily mean a rise in individualism).
  
• Life (especially in cities) is a fluid form of networks.
  
  • Focused on the way people maintained their individual identity while increasing division of labor caused them to rely on complementary activity of others.
    
  • Distinguished social interaction in dyads and triads.

The Cold War brings out Social Network thinking

• Move toward more openness, less groupthink.
  
• Fluid loyalties of those living in less developed countries as colonialism dissolves.
  
  • Western authorities concerned that unconstrained individualism may develop in these countries.
    
  • Research consensus: sense of community was alive in the form of social networks.
    
• Elizabeth Bott’s analysis on why English wives and husbands either did or did not spend leisure time together: based on strength of wives’ kinship networks rather than individual characteristics.
  
• Fear of things falling apart in the U.S. – Civil Rights Movement, inner-city poverty among African Americans, student movement against conformity.
  
  • Rioters were more likely to have strong social ties to their neighborhood and larger friend networks (not caused by an individual sense of alienation).
  • Work of sociologists: Elliot Liebow (Talley's Corner), Carol Stack (All Our Kin), Herbert Gans (Urban Villagers), and Sudhir Venkatesh (Gang Leader for a Day)--focused on the netowrks that hold inner-city neighborhoods together.
• Diffusion of Innovation
  
  • U.S. birth control policy in reaction to higher birth rates in less developed countries.
    
    • Traditional mass media marketing strategies were not effective.
      
    • Find those who spread information the fastest or were bridges between different networks
    • Everett Rogers
      • Innovators (2.5%)
      • Early adopters (13.5%)
      • Early majority (34%)
      • Late majority (34%)
      • Laggards (16%)
  • Spread is not even--heterogeneous networks slow things down--disrupt interaction.
  • Key influencers tend to be the most heavily connected.

The Structure of Social Networks

• Network ties, which vary in 4 ways:
  
  • Quality
    
  • Quantity
    
  • Multiplexity – the bundling of relationships in a tie
    
  • Symmetry
    
• Size and Scale
  
• Roles of different Nodes
  
• Navigating through a network
  
  • Network ties cluster – home pages of websites are easier to get to than any other specific page.
    
  • Superconnectors – people who know everybody or websites that connect to many others.
    
  • The more connections you have, the more you get.
    
    • The “power law”
      
    • Merton’s “Matthew effect” – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer
      
• Weak ties can be more useful than strong ties because they oftentimes connect to different social circles.
  
• Network Brokerage – building connections across different social circles (providing more exposure to a variety of opinions and behaviors).
  
• Bridging ties help get information in and out of a cluster of relationships (cosmopolitans).
  
• Bonding ties build internal trust, efficiency, and solidarity (locals).
  
  • Both bridging and bonding ties are useful for sustaining networks.

Analyzing Social Networks

• Matrices are often used to show how strong the ties are between members of a network.
  
• Information that can be interpreted from a matrix include.
  
  • Clusters of people that are very interconnected (what we would call groups).
    
  • How densely knit these clusters are.
    
  • Where the bridges that connect different clusters are located.
    
  • Network of networks (how different clusters are connected – see interlocking corporate boards of directorates).
    
  • Where indirect or weak ties are in a network (this is typically how information and infectious diseases spread).
    
  • Which people are structurally equivalent to each other.

Clusters of Networked Individuals

• Clusters are more easily found by manipulating the matrix described above using network analysis software.
  
  • This approach tends to underestimate people’s multiple attachments (it does not take into account sentimental feelings of belonging to a community).
    
• “Foci” identify some of the bases for community by providing shared contexts that create the possibility for interconnections among people.
  
• Clusters are very interconnected, but they are usually also connected with other clusters.
  
  • Within-cluster bonding and between-cluster bridging.
    
• Clustering and directionality of political book purchases demonstrate Republican partisans are more cohesive than Democrat partisans (no link between Obama, Democrat, or Republican book clusters).

Personal Networks

• Each individual is at the center of her or his own personal network.
  
• People are not alone – they are connected to many other people from diverse social circles that provide them with different kinds of social capital.
  
• Each person acts as a switchboard connecting other people, networks, and institutions.
  
• Individuals also act as a bridge for their friends to other social circles.
  
• Everyone is connected to everyone else by no more than six links of interpersonal connection.
  
  • Half of the people on Twitter are within 4 links of each other.
    
  • Mean distance of retweets are 955 miles.

Networked Societies

• We all use networks without realizing it.
  
• Being aware of social networks helps us better understand the structure and functioning of our societies, and how best to operate within them.
• Things are not “falling apart” – they are becoming more complex and diverse.
• Weakened comfort of group identity, but more maneuverability in networks.

Chapter 2: What is a Network Society? from, Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 3: The Internet Revolution

Back to The Networked Society Lecture Notes

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