Quality and Medium of Relationships
In "The Quality of Online and Offline Relationships," authors Mesch and Talmud examine the homophily, multiplexity, and duration of online relationships versus face-to-face relationships. The authors review the previous literature about Internet use and network ties, and cite several works about how some online ties progress into face-to-face relationships. (pp 137) This seems like an interesting topic and I would have liked a further discussion about the types of these online ties, especially since the authors cite themselves here. Are there certain functions of online sites that encourage face-to-face progression (like Match.com), an average duration of online tie length before face-to-face meeting, or a limitation on the social support these newly adapted face-to-face ties can offer? Does the relationship shift primarily to face-to-face after the initial jump and online contact diminishes?
The authors explain that adolescent personal friendships are a crucial form of social support, but present discordant research on the quality of online ties. There is a neat discussion of symbolic interactionism versus social constructivists' perspectives about online networks facilitation of strong and weak ties. In the section on homophily and the quality of social ties, the authors state that, "when social dissimilarity exists at the beginning of relationships, or a mismatch occurs in ascribed social statuses, relationships are more likely to terminate." (139) Does this realist statement mean that the friendship or relationship between classes is illusory? Is our increasing number of weak ties due to these transitory relationships between socially dissimilar ties enabled by a somewhat more democratic or egalitarian society but eventually lost to our very homophilious, long-lasting strong ties? This seems to indicate that we can meet our best friends when we are younger and social similarity is fixed (we go to school with kids of same age and somtimes gender, residential proximity is more important), than when we have more options, choices, and mobility when we are older and ascribed group cohesions decay. I like the idea of mulitplexity indicating tie strength, as your "superfriend" ties should be people in which you could do anything with, again with the more eggs in less baskets idea. However, the authors have a credible point in that emotional intensity is the best measure of the strength of a tie. We have seen these emotional support strong network ties measured with Smtih-Lovin, but has there been such a definitive study on if our network ties are becoming more multiplexic (?)
This study evaluates the duration, activity, and content multiplexity of online and offline ties, and also focuses on the effect of origin, duration, and multiplexity to the quality of the relationship. They find that respondents with online friends report greater age range in ties, the duration, intimacy, and strength of the tie are higher for face-to-face friends, and online friends engage in fewer face-to-face activities. Online relationships tend to have less activity and content mulitplexity and tie duration than face-to-face relationships, thus relatively decreasing the quality of these ties compared to face-to-face adolescent ties, which are in part bolstered by schooling and residential similarity. I think it is important to keep in mind this study was about adolescent use of Internet ties, where the median respondent age was about 15.
In "Networked Sociability Online, Off-line," Hampton revisits the hyperpolarized Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft arguments on network community shifts from our Week 1 Wellman reading. Choice is paralyzing, and also there is an illusion that we really create our own networks. Making new friends is hard, making strong ties is even harder. As the constructs that shaped our networks in the past (geographic location, social groups, extended kin affiliation) become less important in a globalized society, our networks are changing, but what constructs can replace them? Our idenities are becoming more complex and we have greater volition in them, but our network communities still need that a form of priming cohesion. I enjoy reading about the changes in "similarity of interest" versus "similarity of setting" and "community without propinquity," but reviewing our assignment #2, who then will rush you chicken soup or lend you sugar or keep an eye on your house when your gone? The haughty attitude towards provincial geographic based communities ignore these significant functions of geogrpahic proximity in relationships.
Hampton discusses Putnam's writings on the loss of social capital and participation in public community organizations. While Putnam castigates the television for this decay, Hampton focuses on traditional and mobile telephone technology's privitization of public space and makes an interesting point about "private spheres of mobile interaction." (219) While Fischer is already alluded to, I thought of our previous Fischer reading that telephone contact frequency is a better indication of strong ties than face-to-face interaction. Mobile telephone and technologic improvements in communication have allowed us to maintain geographically dispersed ties, but their direct connection offers little bridging potential that even calling a friend's home and speaking to their mother allowed. After all of this somewhat depressing discourse, Hampton presents the concept of a virtual community and its potential to create new public space. However the people engaging in online communities are systematically different (have had Internet longer) than people who do not and use the Internet for other functions.
Hampton's concluding declaration that "online communities may become the street corners of the twenty-first century," harks back to my questions about online-originating relationships progressing to face-to-face contact. How can we mobilize this shared social interest to progress from online origins to action in the public sphere? What mechanism could we use to propel Netvilles to face-to-face interaction. Is this a necessary step? The internet is great for organizing, spreading and accessing information (both primarily weak tie resources and support) but what about the social support of chicken soup, town watch, et cetera?
In "Social Interactions Across Media," Baym, Zhang, and Lin enlist college students to record an interaction diary and complete a survey on media use in their social circles. The authors found that Internet use and quality has not usurped face-to-face interaction as the dominant mode of social interaction. A literature review on the research of Internet sociability again reinforces the previous readings' portrayal of this field as spotty and discordant. Baym et al postulate that this is the result of the conglomeration of Internet use into one mass action, and propose differentiating social interaction activity through specific Internet media that college students use. There is an interesting discussion about email's efficient replacement of long-distance phone calls, but the stamina of the telephone for relatives.
The interaction diaries resemble our assignment #3, except for our exclusion of subjective "quality" and "significance" evaluations, which is probably for the best. I found it interesting that not one of the 51 respondents deemed "pioneers" who socialize over the Internet had participated in newsgroups or role-playing games. Their survey results echo the finding by the Pew Project on Internet and American Life that "chatrooms, messageboards, and newsgroups do not serve as meaningful venues for social interaction." (313) This sort of contrasts with the presentation of online use of Internet pioneers in Hampton's piece. I would have rather have had this study include some of those people who are forming new ties through Internet interaction (so we could study where this is happening, what are the rituals or norms, et cetera) instead of college students basically maintaining old ties or more efficiently communicating with established ties in replacing phone technology. I was a little surprised to read that more people were multitasking during face-to-face interaction than Internet or telephone use, but I guess it makes sense as many face-to-face interactions are actually shared experiences aka going out to dinner, road trip, doing homework together, seeing a movie. I would have expected Internet and telephone to be higher than face-to-face as mulitasking during an interaction can connotate disrespect and inattention. Their findings describe new media interactions as taking place at home, further illustrating the network trends of privitization and the disintegration of public space interaction other than face-to-face, despite the potential for mobile bubbles of privitization seen on Locust Walk mobile communiques.
Kronholz's "After the Science Fair," was a cute little allegory about an online chain letter and the expanses of social ties and transmission flow on the Internet. While the article shows the exponential speed and potential reach of a letter from "someone just like us," I would have liked a comparison to the efficacy or encompassing network of concrete chain letters to give this article a little more gravity. I do not think we could use a study similar to this chain letter model to measure weak ties because there are certain taboos on chain letter detritus, as the article claims, "one person's innocent chain letter is another person's spam."
In "Net-Surfers Don't Ride Alone," Wellman begins with a condescending and enjoyable dismissal of the debate over the quality and potential of Internet community as "unscholarly and parochial," reflecting the paradigm shift from spatial community to social network elaborated in Week One's "The Network Community." He returns to many of his points about network evolution from that reading but now focuses on their application in online relationships, as online relationships tend to be specialized, can be a resource for support and companionship and is often reciprocated, establish an egalitarian performance stage and bridge the social taboo towards public interaction with strangers, and can be used to socially define affiliated identity against an "Other." Wellman brings up again the dichotomy between Internet pioneers and mass utilization of the Internet (339). I am really interested in this topic, and hope to read about the development of ties on the Internet that may progress to face-to-face interaction. Wellman continues to evaluate the quality of Internet ties, flippantly dismisses antisocial online behavior (what about Wikipedia defacing and open source communities response to viral threats) and mentions the danger of absence of social clues found in Talmud's symbolic interactionism section. Wellman deftly deconstructs the perspective of online interaction as a measly and hollow simulcra of conventional face-to-face interaction (but I would have liked a reference to the shared experience multitasking finding from Baym's reading) and shows that Internet ties are interspersed with our traditional social networks in a non-zero sum plane. I am not surely convinced of his point about the growing multiplexity of online relationships found in recovering addict communities (349), as our readings for this week do not really approach this subject. He mentions a woman planning a wedding in a newsgroup, but our readings, especially Baym's, show that most people and students do not interact in this forms of Internet sociability, so I doubt this behavior can be generalizable. But this evolution and conversion of online-developed ties to other medium contacts is really interesting and I hope we get to read more. I also enjoyed his discussion of the replacement of shared characteristics with shared interests on the Internet, fostering a more egalitarian and democratic social relationship soil. However, as we saw in Talmud's discussion, social ties that are socially dissimilar at formation tend to decay much faster and are replaced with more homophilious ties. So the Internet may create a more democratic stage for interaction and information flow (aka libraries for the lazy), but ties remain the same. I enjoyed the conclusion about glocalized personal networks.