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

PART II: HOW NETWORKED INDIVIDUALISM WORKS

CHAPTER 5 – NETWORKED RELATIONSHIPS

Introduction

• MacPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears’ “Social Isolation in America” (see also) reported many alarming figures on how Americans confide in one another.
• Between 1984 and 2005, according to the General Social Survey (GSS), the number of people with whom one could discuss important matters declined from 2.9 to 2.1!
• The percentage of Americans who reported having a friend as a confidant declined from 73% to 51%.   
• The media speculated about the internet being the cause of the implicated social isolation.
• This type of alarm is not new, however. It is repetitive—looking back and lamenting over the decay of traditional forms of communication.
• Has the internet become an ad hoc and unfitting scapegoat for perceived social decay and changes in our discussion networks?
• In 2009, Keith Hampton and a Pew Internet Research team revealed the opposite.
• “Social Isolation and New Technology” showed that people who use ICTs (information and communication technologies) have larger and more diverse discussion networks—those with whom they discuss important matters—than people who do not use ICTs.
• Another Pew Internet study found that users of internet, mobile phones, and social networking sites are either no less likely or more likely than others to interact at with those in their local communities.
  • Local News in a Digital Age (Five Key takeaways About Local Media 'Ecosystems')(Pew Research Center, Journalism and Media, March 5, 2015).
• The groundless notion that the internet, as a separate, immersive medium, causes social decay is underpinned by some broad assumptions.
• It assumes that people lead different “virtual” lives, distinct from their everyday real world lives.
• It assumes that in-person encounters are the only meaningful form of social connection.
• It assumes that the internet is limited in its capability for transmitting social cues such as facial expressions and other meaningful gestures.
• It takes Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism—“the medium is the message”—too literally and confuses the medium with the message. The assumption here is that people confuse the Facebook screen with the friend at the other end. A more fitting McLuhanism would be that the media are extensions of people.
• Internet enthusiasts would argue that the internet does not limit sociability and social networking but extends them.
• Internet doomsayers and fanatics alike may be so consumed with the newness of the technology that they become either too presentist and parochial. They do not look far enough back and they look at the internet through too narrow a lens. Social scientists refer to this manner of thinking as “technological determinism”.
• Much research has evidence that past technologies such as telegraphs and telephones have done more to extend than extinguish our supportive networks.

From Door-to-Door to Place-to-Place Networks

• The preindustrial door-to-door village model of community is no longer sufficient for describing how we network. A more suitable model would be one that defines our communities as multiple, fragmented personal networks connected by individuals and households at their centers.
• The move away from the “village” community happened with “glocalization” in the advent of more advanced transportation and telecommunication technologies that took place after WWII and before the Mobile and Internet Revolutions.
• Though many social networks remained anchored in households, as Wellman demonstrated in his Toronto research, people traveled and their personal communities grew beyond mere door-to-door sociability. People became connected place-to-place.

From Place-to-Place to Person-to-Person Networks

• Advances made in personalized and mobile connectivity during the Triple Revolution helped relationships move from place-to-place networks to person-to-person networks.
• People maneuver between a multitude of roles and sparsely knit networks tied together by loose linkages between individuals in their person-to-person networks.
• Such networking allows the individual and not the household or kinship group to be the primary unit of connectivity. This type of networking also provides diversity, choice, and the opportunity for “communities” to transcend group boundaries. 
• This form of connectivity—networked individualism—means that we maneuver through multiple networks, and our commitments to and involvement in these networks are limited only by their multiplicity.
• As such, with our shift toward flexible autonomy has come “limited liability”. As people limit their involvement and commitments to their networks, the others members of that given network or social environment are not as committed to offering support.
• New social norms have developed around our new social spaces. Because of increased opportunities to relate, we can be more selective about with whom we relate.
• These norms may change how we do privacy. In their “islands of privacy” individuals may limit their interactions with their immediate community (religious proselytizers or door-to-door salespeople). Teachers may be encouraged not to become Facebook “friends” with their students.
• What about the networked self in networked individualism?
• Sherry Turkle argues that our “second selves”—our online selves—differ from our offline selves.
• Our online-offline selves may be more integrated, however.
• The networked self is reconfigured as it moves from one milieu to the next.

Networked Relationships On- and Offline

• At opposite extremes are two conceptions of networked relationships.
• One is of a McLuhanian “Global Village”, a boundless and borderless world wherein physical space and cyberspace blend seamlessly together and endless relationships and knowledge rest at our fingertips.
• The other is a lonely, isolated world, where the user has become alienated from others because of internet and mobile technologies.
• The evidence reveals that the more internet contact people have with others, the more in-person and phone contact they have. Contrary to the doomsayers’ prophecies, the number of important relationships seems to be growing with advances in internet and mobile phone technologies.
• One survey found that the average number of friends whom American adults see in-person at least weekly grew from 9.4% in 2002 to 11.3% in 2007. This does not include relatives, which may or may not have been seen as “friends”.
• Pew Internet’s “The Strength of Internet Ties” study found that people who email the great majority of their core ties at least weekly are also in phone contact with more core ties than “non-emailers”.
• Though the internet is becoming ever ubiquitous, as of 2007 only 23% of internet users reported having one or more “virtual friends” with whom they have met only online.
• Bonnie Nardi found that many of these users are players of popular MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) such as World of Warcraft. They often identified with friendships in networked clans (guilds), but in such milieus, virtual friendships in those clans “…decay or grow inert without interaction.”  
• Above all, though in-person contact may be declining, it predominates in all neighborly interaction.

How Large Are Personal Networks?

• Dunbar’s Number: 150
• Robin Dunbar proposes that our “social brains” can maintain only around 150 personal relationships in a cohesive group.
• According to Dunbar, social network, such as one might belong to on Facebook, “consists of four layers, the Circles of Acquaintanceship, which scale relative to each other by a factor of three (an inner core of five intimates, and then successive layers at 15, 50, and 150).
• Quantity goes along with quality:
• Not only does size of the network matter, but weak ties matter, as well! They provide a sense of community.
• Other scholars have found that Dunbar’s number is far too limiting when thinking about the complexities of social life in developed countries.
• Working with Pew Internet, Keith Hampton and Lauren Sessions Goulet found that internet users have on average 669 social ties in their networks while nonusers have on average 506 ties. These could be underestimates, as well!

Who Is in Personal Networks?

• The Connected Lives study shows that roughly 50% of very close ties in North American networks are kin, 41% are friends, 5% are workmates or schoolmates, and 4% are neighbors.   

Sparsely Knit, Segmented, and Specialized Personal Communities

• Most members of a social network are not directly connected with one another; i.e., personal communities are “sparsely knit”.
• Wellman’s 1979 study of East Yorkers revealed that weaker ties were very sparsely interconnected, with a density of 13%.
• Network density is defined as the sum of the ties divided by the number of possible ties. 5 ties out of 15 possible ties equates to a density of 0.3333 (repeating), or 33.33%.
• The larger the network, the less likely that two networked individuals will be directly connected.
• Personal communities are usually specialized (e.g., parents may help with long-term financial support while neighbors may help with unexpected short-term emergencies).
• Supportive relationships tend to last longer than non-supportive relationships.
• Change in network membership may be more punctuated than gradual, coinciding suddenly with events such as childbirth and marriage.

Core Networks Do More than Discuss Important Matters

• Contrary to the figure that the GSS reported on the number of people with whom Americans discuss important matters, the research reveals that we have many more than 2.1 close ties in our personal communities.
• The “important matters” that Americans discuss vary, as do the types of the core and sparsely knit personal ties that they maintain. Americans may be mutually enmeshed in broader networks of kinship, friendship, workplace, and supportive networks.
• Taking these possible variations and differences into consideration, the Connected Lives study finds that Torontonians are close or pretty close to around 12.3 people—a more representative figure than 2.1.
• Social “closeness” is not a one-dimensional phenomenon. It can mean a lot more to networked individuals than merely discussing important matters.
• Closeness may also entail exchanging short-term or long-term support, chatting about one’s day, “schmoozing” with one another, and connecting through email. 

Networks in the Age of Facebook

• Half of all Americans use social networking sites—42% of American adults (53% of internet users) are Facebook users.
• With more frequent and longer durations of engagement with ICTs and social networking sites, networked individuals are influencing the content and flow of interpersonal information in unprecedented ways.
• Social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogging sites such as Twitter have changed the way in which we connect with one another. These sites enable us to bond with others in new ways, reconnect with old friends, and strengthen sustained contact with weaker ties.
• Facebook users can also bridge as well as bond: Users can connect to other personal communities and cross boundaries between the social milieus of others.
• To sum up, Facebook thus epitomizes both networked individualism and the new social operating system.

The More, the Merrier

• The internet is not killing sociability.
• The internet, for the most part, promotes bonding and bridging, facilitates more diverse, larger social and supportive networks.
• ICTs have transformed communication, relationships, and personal communities.
• In short, “The more people use the internet, the more friends they have, the more they see their friends, and the more socially diverse are their networks” (146).

Chapter 6: Networked Families

Back to The Networked Society Lecture Notes

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