Social Network Blog - g23

Intro:
"Gathering network data through sociometric questioning means asking respondents to indicate the frequency of their contacts with other members of the organization" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.433). In our surveys we analyzed people’s contacts through the name generator, measuring the duration of how long they’ve known each other, type of exchange (discussing important matters), medium used (in person, phone, cell phone, postal mail, email, IM). We also measured people's social capital, "defined as resources embedded in a social structure that are accessed and / or mobilized in purposive actions" (Lin, Fu, & Hsung, 2001, p.58). We did this throughout the position generator, using "a sample of ordered structural positions salient in a society (occupations, authorities, work units, class or sector) and asking respondents to indicate contacts (e.g., those known on a first-name basis), if any, in each of the positions" (Lin, Fu, & Hsung, 2001, p.63). Measures of range (distance between the highest and lowest accessed positions), extensity (number of positions accessed), and upper reachability (prestige or status of the highest position accessed) from Lin, Fu, & Hsung (2001, p.63) were used to assess the results of the position generator.

Social Support:
This survey measured two types of social support: strong and weak social support.

Weak Ties/Network Diversity:
The results of the position generator are listed below. The position generator is used to assess one's weak ties and network diversity (access to people in various occupations). Overall males over 33 had the highest "Upper Reachability" and broadest "Range", while females over 33 had the highest "Extensity". These results indicate that age definitely increased one's ability to access various resources, both on the high end and low end of the prestigious ladder set up by this survey.

In the Taiwan study by Lin, Fu, & Hsung (2001, p. 67) females were “generally disadvantaged in accessing many of the positions”. This did not prove to be true in the surveys I administered, as women had the highest "Extensity" (number of positions accessed). This could be due to the fact that more women in the U.S. work outside the home and further, leave the home to run errands and such. Differences in mobility outside the home and female-role in the U.S. family are the two most likely explanations for this observation.

Females 18-22
Upper reachability: 12.8
Range: 2.8-12.8
Extensity: 6.8

Males 18-22
Upper reachability: 13.2
Range: 2.6-13.2
Extensity: 7.6

Females over 33
Upper reachability: 13.4
Range: 1-13.4
Extensity: 11.4

Males over 33
Upper reachability: 14.8
Range: 1-14.8
Extensity: 10.8

Strong Ties/Network Size:
The name generator was used to measure a specific type of strong tie - those with whom one discusses important matters. We know from Wellman and Wortley (1990, p.566) that "strong ties provide broader support than weaker active ties, significantly more emotional aid, minor services, and companionship". They also note that "respondents appear to get most of their social support – of all kinds – through their small number of strong ties" (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.566). We extend this definition in this survey to include those with whom they would discuss important matters.

I'm not fully convinced, however, that people only discuss important matters with close/strong ties. As indicated from some of the articles we read about online relationships, people are likely to feel more open to talking about personal matters when they don't know the person, or there is little chance of them meeting or the information spreading around one's community. This made me think of the role of Bishops, Priests, etc. Historically, and even today with computers, it seems that people have always had others that they share their personal information with who are not close ties. For the future, it would be interesting to add that measure to the survey to see how close these "core discussion networks" really are.

McPherson et. al.'s study (conducted in 1985 and again in 2004) indicates that "the number of discussion partners in the typical American's interpersonal environment has decreased by nearly one person," and the "modal number of discussion partners has gone from three to zero" (p.358). This trend toward social isolation was not observed in my results.

Important Matters Data:
Females 18-22
# of people (max 6): 5.8

Males 18-22
# of people (max 6): 5

Females over 33
# of people (max 6): 5.8

Males over 33
# of people (max 6): 4.8

Additional measures of tie strength are duration and frequency of contact (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears, 2006, p.357). In this survey, we recorded the strength between those in the respondent's core discussion network, duration of relationship, and frequency of contact via 6 mediums over the past month (30 days). Although not always a clear indication of a close tie, I also tabulated the percentage of people in one's core discussion network that were family-members. This is likely to under-represent the number of close ties in one's network, but is nonetheless interesting, and possibly a clue as to the strength of the relationships within one's core discussion network.

Females 18-22
Within core discussion network -
% Especially close: 34%
% Know each other: 36%
% Strangers: 30%
% of people in respondent’s family: 52%
Range of how long known: ½ – 22

Males 18-22
Within core discussion network -
% Especially close: 12%
% Know each other: 56%
% Strangers: 33%
% of people in respondent’s family: 36%
Range of how long known: 1-22

Females over 33
Within core discussion network -
% Especially close: 36%
% Know each other: 31%
% Strangers: 33%
% of people in respondent’s family: 59%
Range of how long known: 2 months-53 years

Males over 33
Within core discussion network -
% Especially close: 29%
% Know each other: 41%
% Strangers: 29%
% of people in respondent’s family: 50%
Range of how long known: 2-54

Network Density:
As we can see from the results, one's core discussion network in all four categories was around 30% strangers. This suggests, based on Granovetter's forbidden triad between close ties, that one's confidants may not all be close ties. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about anonymous, or weakly tied, confidants. Overall, females were likely to have more dense networks, with percentages of "especially close" ties between confidants in the 30's for both age categories.

Community/Privatization:
Wellman states, "Local relationships are necessary for domestic safety, controlling actual land-use, and quickly getting goods and services" (1999, p.27). Here we see that they are not necessary for discussing important matters. Almost every respondent checked the "same country" box at least once when describing those with whom they discuss important matters. McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears talk about the "shift away from ties formed in neighborhood and community contexts and toward conversations with close kin (especially spouses)" (2006, p.353). This was definitely shown to be true, as all respondents with a spouse listed their spouse as someone they discuss important matters with and almost everyone listed a family member within their core discussion network. Further, 49% of all confidants were family members. This was surprisingly high, as the average respondent listed 5.35 confidants, making 2.6 of those confidants family.

This survey did not measure privatization in its literal sense since it did not measure where these people met, from where they communicated, etc. The data on family is as close as we come to this measure. From this we get a conceptual idea of privatization, but no concrete data on the physical location.

Homophily:
We know from this semester's readings that our networks are generally "homogeneous networks of people with similar attitudes and lifestyles" (Wellman, 1999, p.31). This is because "people tend to build networks composed of others very similar to themselves in background, position, personality, and way of life" (Fischer, 1982, p.6). In addition to the choices we make, "kin tend to be of the same race, religion, and national origin" (Fischer, 1982, p.6), making our unchosen networks homophilous as well.

Because we know that 49% of the respondents' confidants in this survey were family members we can pretty safely assume that these networks are fairly homophilous. Also, since every married respondent listed his/her spouse as a confidant and we know that "marriage and family ties are more homophilous on class, religion, race, and several other social attributes than ties formed in other ways" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears, 2006, p.359), we can assume homophily there as well.

Where gender is concerned, we know that "by the time that they are adults, people have friendship and confidant networks that are relatively sex-integrated" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.423). This didn't really prove to be the case, except with males aged 18-22. All four groups had percentages slightly-to- moderately leading in the percentage of confidants of their own sex.

Females 18-22
Age range of respondents: 21-22
Age range of confidants: 21-67
Sex of confidants: 38% male, 62% female (out of 29)
% of people in respondent’s family: 52%

Males 18-22
Age range of respondents: 21-22
Age range of confidants: 21-58
Sex of confidants: 52% male, 48% female (out of 25)
% of people in respondent’s family: 36%

Females over 33
Age range of respondents: 40-58
Age range of confidants: 22-74
Sex of confidants: 41% male, 59% female (out of 29)
% of people in respondent’s family: 59%

Males over 33
Age range of respondents: 52-59
Age range of confidants: 26-78
Sex of confidants: 67% male, 33% female
% of people in respondent’s family: 50%

McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook note that "in studies of close friendship, homophily on age can be stronger than any other dimension (excepting perhaps race)" (2001, p.424). This also didn't prove true in my survey results, as all four categories of respondents had age ranges of their confidants from early to mid twenties, to their late fifties, and often beyond.

Role of New Media:
From Wellman's article we know that "people easily maintain far-flung ties by telecommunications (with telephones recently being joined by faxes, electronic mail, and the Web)" (1999, p.26). McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook argue that "the advent of new technologies like print, the telegraph, the telephone, and e-mail may have loosened the bounds of geography by lowering the effort involved in contact, but these new modes have certainly not eliminated the old pattern" (2001, p.430). My results also show this weakening of the geographical boundaries of community, aided mostly through the advent of new media communication. Out of the 20 people that I surveyed, only 9 used postal mail within the past 30 days, and even those people were more likely to use new media than postal mail. Among the younger age group (18-22), cell phone was more likely to be used than phone, and among the older group, phone and cell phone were equally likely to be used. Most respondents seemed to rely more on one than the other, but it went both ways between phone and cell phone use.

Baym & Zhang found that “email was considered superior to the telephone for keeping in touch with people who lived far away and in different time-zones” (Baym & Zhang, 2004, p.303). 7 out of 10 of the older respondents used email, while 100% of the younger respondents used email. This shows a generational gap in the new media usage that I doubt would appear if these same surveys are given in another 30 or so years.

People used phone, cell phone, and personal contact far more than email, IM, and postal mail. Baym & Zhang note that the "Internet was rated worse for maintaining relationships, and better for getting schoolwork done and exchanging information" (2004, p.304). They also found that "email was inferior to phone calls or face-to-face meetings for relational communication" (2004, p.304). This goes along with my results, as discussing important matters is probably more easily done via these faster mediums and also likely to be more intimate and personal when you can hear the other person's voice.

Issues of Measurement:
There were several issues of validity and accuracy in the measurements we used in these surveys. One point continues to surprise me. Of the 10 adults I surveyed over 33 years of age, 8 of those were married couples (4 couples). Most of these couples, although listing each other as confidants for the "important matters" question, reported different ages, relationships, how long they've known each other, and communication within the past month with their spouses. One time I even pointed it out to the couple as they were both in the same room taking the survey, and it prompted immediate disagreement on how long they've known each other. It was quite humorous, but also quite discouraging as I began to question my results.

Until I carried out a media diary for a week for this class, I probably would have been equally bad at guessing the number of days of various new media communication within the last month. I feel like people simply have no idea, and their guess is probably as good as mine.

"Reliability issues are often addressed in relation to the kinds of questions asked" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.434). One threat to the validity of the measure of number of confidants in one's core discussion network is the fact that "respondents may be restricted to mention a preset number of contacts" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.433). This number was six in these surveys and I often had to cut people off even though they wanted to continue naming people.

Another issue of these surveys was that they "focused on a specific time frame" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.434) - discussing important matters in the past 6 months and contact with those people over the past month. I think it is hard to expect people to conceptualize that specific time frame and also remember that far back.

Besides simply forgetting, "an important issue is the truthfulness of respondents’ self-reports" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.434). "They may randomly forget about certain contacts or relationships they have, but their forgetfulness may also be more systematic" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.435). In one study, "contacts with persons who are nearby or higher in rank are reported more frequently than others" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.435). This makes sense and may also contribute to why men may appear to have a larger "Upper Reachability" and "Range" on the position generator. Since they aren't asked about their relationship with these people, they may be lying, saying they know more people of higher prestige, when in reality they don't.

"Another validity issue is the way sociometric questions are interpreted by the respondents" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.435). Some of the respondents thought of important matters as "work-related matters…others were thinking about private matters" (Zwijze-Koning and de Jong, 2005, p.435). Because of this, it becomes hard to know whether all respondents think of the same definition of important matters when asked to list these people in their network. This reminded me of the McPherson et. al. study where interpretation was also an issue. People did not know what constituted as "discuss" and whether people could really discuss things via Internet.

In Marin and Hampton's article, "all single generators failed to provide reliable estimates across a broad spectrum of network measures, including key variables such as size and density" (2006, p.1). Therefore name generators themselves "are not without their problems” (Marin & Hampton, 2006, p.2). They note that "name generators on a whole are often less reliable measures of network phenomenon than available alternatives" (Marin & Hampton, 2006, p.3), but that time and resources are often limits to the way in which one collects data. More specifically "name generators and corresponding interpreters are often viewed as particularly time consuming and complicated to administer" (Marin & Hampton, 2006, p.5). The drawback to using a single name generator is that it "does not address the full definition of social support" (Marin & Hampton, 2006, p.5). However in this survey we did not necessarily need to delve into the full definition of support, and although "no single name generator reliably and consistently predicted the number of people in each role relationship" (Marin & Hampton, 2006, p.10), the stand alone generator, “who are the people with whom you discuss matters important to you,” “often correlated moderately to strongly with measures based on the full multiple generator model that described the demographic characteristics of alters, the relationship between ego and alter, network activity, and network density" (Marin & Hampton, 2006, p.16). This means that although multiple generators are more accurate, the benefit to cost ratio of increased accuracy to increased time is not enough in the "important matters" question to warrant using more than the single generator.

Conclusion:
Overall, administering the surveys was the hardest part of this assignment. I realized just how homophilous my network is in the fact that it was really hard for me to find people over the age of 33 and even harder to find males over the age of 33. I'm glad we got the chance to do this though, as my sympathy for my colleagues and others who administer surveys has grown immensely over these past few weeks. This survey, although not without its weaknesses, is in my opinion fairly good. It's the respondents who are bad at remembering important facts about their confidants and their communication with these confidants. A survey that can figure out a way to solve this problem is probably too good to be true.

The Fernandez and Harris article discusses how inner-city black communities are beginning to become trapped as an "underclass" and in a culture of poverty, isolated from mainstream society. This is bad because "social isolation exacerbates the effects of being concentrated in very poor areas because such isolation limits inner-city residents' opportunities to those found in their socially disadvantaged neighborhoods" (p.258). This reminded me of the article we read a long time ago about Lois Weisberg and how she implemented art programs to bring the poor and middle-class kids together because she understood how important it would be for those lower-class children to have those contacts later on in life.

The authors define mainstream society as consisting of "individuals who are steadily employed, not involved in public assistance, and who reside in 'stable areas'" (p.261). I thought this was an interesting way to define mainstream society; however, I saw problems with the definition of "stable areas". For example, do you think you could have an area with crime and drug use and call it mainstream society if there were no surrounding regions that differed in these two respects? In other words, isn't "mainstream society" a relative term?

The study found that the nonworking poor are the most isolated (p.270), and suggest that integrating them with more stable, economically wealthy people will benefit their social networks and help them become part of mainstream society. However, I wonder about this solution of the dispersal of poor people into other areas (p.290). The authors state that it is "not at all troubling" (p.290). I tend to disagree. What possible negative effects could this have toward those who are already a part of the "mainstream society"? What positive effects could it have?

Also, there was a gender bias found in the results. Only women were shown to be "cut off from people generally" (p.289). Why do you think this was the case?

Marsden and Hurlbert base their ideas on previous findings consistent with Granovetter's idea of the power of weak ties to connect one to jobs and information. Studies generally reveal that "personal contacts are the primary way in which job-seekers acquire information about the jobs they accept" (p.1039).

One of their findings was that "contacts reached by weak ties tend to be of higher prestige than those reached via strong ones" (p.1052). In thinking about this, what implications does this have in one's personal life, outside the realm of finding a job? Do you think it is more beneficial in the long run to have close friends who are of higher prestige? Why or why not?

In the end the authors concluded that "tie strength may not be the most important feature of networks to study in analyses of job-matching" (p.1054). Instead of personal ties, they suggest looking into other forms of ties (for example voluntary associations) and also concentrating on the information accessible to an individual, rather than the form of the tie through which it is obtained. In your past experience, what do you think are the most important kinds of ties and features of networks in finding jobs?

My own experience:

My folder was passed precisely along the pathway that I hypothesized. Me--->Julia--->Kimberly--->Elizabeth--->Susan Yoon. It was exciting to see that my plan for this folder’s path succeeded and that Julia relayed my message accurately to the other pre-planned intermediaries in the chain. Although we’ve all played the “telephone” game before and know that more often than not, messages become greatly distorted with each additional intermediary, I think the fact that I repeated the message three times to Julia during our hand-off conversation made a difference in Julia recognizing how important this pathway was to me. Since I gave the folder to Julia on a Sunday night, and knew that the last intermediary had a class with Susan Yoon on Monday evenings, I figured my folder would not make it to Susan Yoon until the following Monday. I was wrong. My folder made it to Susan Yoon on Tuesday, September 26th, only two days after I handed it to the first intermediary! I was surprised to find that the folder got there so soon, but I was not surprised that it did get there. I think the success of my folder was primarily due to the fact that I planned out the path in advance, and asked the intermediaries only to deliver it. They did not have to do the real work of figuring out who to give the folder to. Wellman states that "the Internet either will create wonderful new forms of community or will destroy community altogether" (p.8). Later on in the semester we learned from Wellman and Gulia about the Internet's supplemental role in communication (p.339). I would definitely agree that having the internet at my disposal fostered the Penn community I was already a part of and helped me find my best 2nd alter. Without it, I would've likely made the "wrong small world choice" according to Killworth. I needed to have the "full information", or rather, know the "actual shortest path" (p.86). Without the internet, I can almost guarantee my chain would have been longer. Julia was the last person on my mind when I received the folder in class.

Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties" article inspired me to be brave and give the folder to someone who was a weak tie. He talks about how weak ties can often lead you to bridges, connecting you to people who are otherwise out of your network reach (p.1364). Besides the fact that Julia was a weak tie, she was also a freshman. This was my only real hesitation - passing the folder through two freshmen, one who I barely knew, and one I didn’t know at all. In the Stevenson et. al. article it reads, “we would expect that freshmen would have less connections to others as compared to seniors” (p.2). This wasn’t true in my case, as Kimberly is a freshman and had the precise connection to an Education grad student that I needed to reach. In the results of their study, “no student ever passed a folder to a student in a lower class” (p.5). However, my folder was eventually passed through a graduate student before reaching the target, as were the folders in the Stevenson study which “converged on faculty, graduate students and staff” because of their closeness to the administration (p.5).

McPherson touches on the idea of geography becoming less of an issue for network ties and how this shift is affecting our social networks. I found it interesting, however, that I lived in the same building as my second and third alters. Had I lived in a more "upper class" building, my first hand-off might have been different. As I thought about this, I wondered how many other student within our study handed it off to someone who lives in their close proximity. Although Penn is a small community to begin with, I wonder if anyone else gave it to someone who lived in their own house/dorm. This would have been an interesting measurement for future Small World class experiments.

The Stevenson study also found that each sex was “more likely to pass folders across boundaries while keeping the folder within their gender” (p.6). This turned out to be true in my case as well, as the chain consisted of all females, and more specifically female to female links between boundaries such as different classes within undergraduate students, undergraduate to graduate, and White to Asian.

Aggregate results:

The aggregate results for Susan Yoon and Antonio Polley differed significantly. The Susan Yoon folders had a success rate of 80%, while the Antonio Polley folders had a success rate of only 25%. In the Stevenson study it notes that “Lundberg had found a completion rate of 57% in his organizational study as compared to a 21% rate in his society study” (p.4). Because both the Stevenson and the Penn Small World studies were also organizational, we could expect a completion rate of 57%. However, the Stevenson study only achieved a 27% success rate, similar to the Antonio Polley success rate of 25%. On the other hand, the Susan Yoon success rate far exceeded the supposed organizational study success rate. But taking the average success rate of Susan Yoon and Antonio Polley we find a success rate of around 53%, much closer to the expected 57%. This makes me wonder how Lundberg got this percentage, and if he too, aggregated the results to form a more holistic hypothesis. It wasn’t surprising, however, that our class had an easier time getting the folders to Susan Yoon since she is an assistant professor here at Penn and works with students on a daily basis, while Antonio Polley is a staff member who probably rarely interacts with students outside of his affiliation.

One result of our class’ study that differed significantly from the Stevenson study was the act of passing the folders from students in a higher class to students in a lower class. While in the Stevenson study, no student ever passed a folder downward in class ranking, 29% did so in the Antonio Polley study and 60% in the Susan Yoon. Further, 40% of the completed chains in the Antonio Polley study were downward hand-offs between students, 56% of the Susan Yoon completed chains also exhibited this student transfer trend.

Also, unlike the particular convergence trend that occurred on faculty, graduate students, and staff, there was only one out of all the last intermediate links for the completed chains that had a frequency of 2. Every other last intermediate link was only utilized once. This goes against Stevenson’s idea of convergence points and Milgram’s finding of “a decrease in the number of different persons who were involved in the chains as they approached the target” (p.102).

Out of 10 students who participated in the Susan Yoon part of the study, 8 had gender homophily throughout. In the Antonio Polley study, out of 8 students, only 1 had gender homophily throughout the chain. This could help describe the relevant success and failure of the Susan Yoon paths and the Antonio Polley paths respectively. In the Korte and Milgram study we learned that the majority of racial crossovers occurred between the last intermediate and the target (p.106). Although Antonio Polley is a male and many of the students in the class are females, the success rate might have been higher if the gender crossover occurred later in the chain (i.e. at the last link).

Another result that differed from the Stevenson article and likely contributed to the failure of delivery of the Antonio Polley was the affiliation crossover. Stevenson notes the reliability of faculty, graduate students and staff by finding that “7 out of 8 folders that reached these groups were passed directly to the target administrator” (p.5). It is interesting that for the Antonio Polley folders, the crossover from student to staff for the successful folders occurred only at the link between the last intermediary and Antonio himself. 3 out of the 6 remaining unsuccessful folders made the crossover to these affiliations sooner in the chain, with the last 3 never making this crossover at all. So although in the Stevenson article these were reliable intermediaries, they weren’t in the case of Antonio Polley. However, in the Susan Yoon study, the folders that passed through these avenues before reaching the target were successful. In this case Korte and Milgram were correct in saying that going down or across the status ladder is more successful than trying to go up it for the last link to the target. They find a striking pattern of "status descent of the chain at the last link" (p.107). For our study, it would've been hard to find connections above our targets, especially for Susan Yoon because undergraduates are far more likely to know others students rather than professors, let alone the bosses of professors. The difference in results for Antonio and Susan could’ve been for several reasons. The reason that seems most plausible to me is that Susan Yoon’s network is likely more professionally organized and weakly tied while Antonio Polley’s network might consist of few professional ties and more specialized close ties within his research/work. I would also say that because of Susan Yoon’s job here at Penn she is likely more connected to the Penn community than Antonio Polley.

Link to Assignment #1 - Part 1:
http://www.mysocialnetwork.net/blog/481/g23/2006/09/stalking_and_scheming_4_degree.html

Cohen, Brissette, Skoner, and Doyle provide interesting research for the idea that one's social network can affect one's health. Their research supports the existing theories associated with the idea that "occupying diverse social roles is beneficial to health" (p.10).

One idea that I found interesting in this article was the notion of "role strain" and how it can actually be beneficial for our psychological well-being (p.3). As we take on different roles in our lives, we are faced with obligations associated with those roles, and this can create both role conflict and role overload. However, the benefits of this "burden" far outweigh the costs since "role accumulation is more gratifying than stressing" (p.3). This idea made sense to me and caused me to pause and think about how this might relate to why medical schools are looking for such well-rounded candidates. A well-rounded person is someone who participates in many activities, therefore having many roles and obligations and in turn also having experienced stress associated with those roles. This exposure to stress is important to the future physician and gives him the experience he may need to handle stress in the future when someone's life is on the line. I've always wondered why it matters so much that these future physicians have these extra-curricular activities, but taking the concept of "role strain" into consideration, it makes a lot more sense.

Cohen et. al. also discuss how having social roles give people a sense of their identity and purpose in life, and also helps to impose behavioral expectations on people making, their behavior less deviant and more predictable (p.3). These are interesting insights and further add to the idea that having multiple social roles may increase an individual’s health.

Although it seems quite counter-intuitive to think that being around more people would make one more healthy, the authors make a clear distinction between an increase in risk of upper respiratory infection and an increase in resistance to these infections. In their study they are only interested in the latter (p.4)

I found it interesting that they could get enough people to actually sign up for this study, knowing they would be subjected to a virus. Although they mention possible flaws to the experiment (such as measuring the baseline at the beginning of quarantine when they might already be stressed - p.10) and various limitations to the experiment, they don't mention what type of incentive they gave to these people to get them to enroll in the study. What kind of effect, if any, would a payment incentive have on this experiment? What kind of people would they then be recruiting? Would these people be "risk takers" and how may this thwart their results?

Because neither of their proposed pathways predicted their results, they offered an alternative pathway of personality to consider (p.8-9). Why do you think that introversion-extraversion is associated with susceptibility to colds? Do you think it's more likely to be a cause or an effect?

Dickens et. al.'s article was rather depressing to read. The two main findings of the study are as follows:
1.) No association was found between "depression before MI and subsequent mortality or cardiac events" (p.521).
2.) "Having a close confidant approximately halved the risk of having a subsequent cardiac event, even after controlling for demographic and coronary risk factors, severity of MI, and discharge medication" (p.521).

In this study the researchers defined "social support" as whether or not a patient had a close confidant (regular contact with another person at least once a month and someone "with whom he or she could share sensitive personal information and gain support") (p.519). They also had patients complete a HADS questionnaire "to reflect the mental state in the week before the MI" (p.519). My question is, how did they know when the patient was going to have an MI? Maybe I'm just not understanding the way this study was conducted, but this doesn't quite make sense to me.

What I found interesting about the results was the fact that although "patients without a close confidant were more likely to be presenting with their second or subsequent MI... they did not have more severe index MIs" (p.520-521). This was really amazing to me especially considering the three criteria they used to assess the severity of the index MI (p.518).

I really liked how the authors noted the possible flaws to the experiment (a recall bias of the depression and the MI, and only including those who survived their MI until the time of the assessment - p.521), and also talked about what they would've done differently (measured depression one we after the MI to compare - p.521). These are important things to discuss for future experiments' sake and also for interpreting this experiment's findings.

Bearman, Moody, and Sovel examine the structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks using kids from an almost all-white high school in Jefferson City. Since it is the only public high school in the town, it is easier to study the entire network under these isolating conditions (p.53). They talk about different mixing methods, broadly categorized into random and nonrandom, and decide that partner-selection processes do play a role in their study. People "often prefer contact with those who are similar to themselves with respect to race, religiosity, sexual preference, activity level, and so on” (p.47-48). Later they discuss homophily more, noting that in their study homophily "does not extend to all characteristics, most obviously sex and age” (p.69). Basically what they mean here is that girls date boys and boys date girls and also that girls tend to date older boys and vice versa.

Although different models are discussed, the network structure they discover most "closely approximates a spanning tree" (p.52). This type of structure is considered "structurally fragile because a deletion of a single tie or a single node can break a large component into disconnected subgraphs" (p.61). One thing that I was wondering as I read this article was the importance of direction in this network structure. Do you think direction matters when considering STD contraction? Is it more likely that the central circle will contract the STD or people in the branching subgraphs? Does that depend on where the STD starts? At what starting point would the disease be most likely to spread to everyone?

I was surprised that only "less than one-quarter of all Jefferson students reported no romantic or nonromantic sexual relationship during the preceding 18 months," (p.57) especially since these kids were only in high school. That number seemed awfully high considering the high response rate to the in-school questionnaires and the at-home interviews. Another finding that surprised me was that "50% of the students at Jefferson were chained together through romantic and sexual relationships that could have involved the exchange of fluids" (p.60). It's also scary to realize that "STD risk is not simply a matter of number of partners" (p.60).

I also liked the analogy of the Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice situation. It makes sense why we might not expect to see certain relationships form despite the pressures to date homophilous people. Homophilous ties might not be extended to dating those who dated those we dated, or something like that anyway. There are definitely social norms we must take into consideration when looking at isolated networks such as these. And then again, small towns sometimes can't help breaking these norms because there are so few options of who to date.

All in all, their findings of the spanning tree explain "why the rates of bacterial STDs have been so high among adolescents in the past decade, and why most social policy, which focuses on high-risk individuals within the adolescent community, has failed to stem the flood of new infection" (p.81). These findings are important from improving STD education techniques.

Tepperman's article discusses processes of how to go about searching for deviant behavior. The paper specifically discusses deviant behavior, although deviant intentions are also touched upon. Acts/intentions that are defined as deviant are not static, they are constantly changing due to the fact that "as deviant intentions come to fruition more often, they typically become less deviant - statistically, morally and legally" (p.3). Because of this, deviance must be defined relative to a particular moment in time and to a particular community or location (p.3). The paper aims to "show the utility of network analysis and the 'search metaphor' in analysing a particular social process" since no neat typology exists at this point from which to advance in the analysis of deviant searches (p.3).

Tepperman starts with an analogy of detecting an enemy vessel's presence and exact location in a square of open sea. This brought me back to my "Battleship" days when I used to play this familiar game with my friends. This type of search, Tepperman notes, is "like looking for a needle in a haystack" (p.4). He talks about how it differs from a marijuana buyer's search since "there may be places to start the search that are more likely to bring early success than are other places" (p.5). While limited by time and money, a search is more likely to be successful when a social-cognitive map is well-developed by the searcher. Also, unlike the game of Battleship, deviant facilitators are not really spread randomly over space.

I liked the idea of how deviance is "highly functional from the standpoint of social integration, and it may as often create social ties and interdependencies between neighborhoods as disrupt them" (p.6). He talks about how this creates ties between the city and suburbs. This also goes along with his later idea of "closed networks" (p.9-10). He says that "inequality and segregation help maintain the closure of networks" (p.11). Both of these ideas seem to allude to the fact that deviant behavior may be beneficial to society in some ways.

Tepperman also talks about the unreliability of intermediaries (p.7). This reminded me of our "small world" experiment and how many of the folders have not yet reached their targets. What percentage of the folders that never reached the target do you think will have been lost by our classmate's first handoff (someone they actually knew) vs. lost by an intermediary further down the line who does not know the classmate? What is it about intermediaries that make them "risky" in both the "small world" experiment and in the deviant's network?

I was also shocked when Tepperman said that "we probably all know one or more of the following: a homosexual, a drug seller, a thief, an alcoholic, a nymphomaniac... however, we may not know that we know such people..." (p.7). Are these characteristics really that hard to detect in our weak ties? Do you think a close tie could have one of these traits without your knowing or just a weak tie?

On page 8, Tepperman says, "It is impossible in any concrete sense to "get above" society and see it all laid out neatly below". This made me think about how I had friends growing up exhibiting every one of the socially deviant behaviors listed in the previous paragraph and how none of them ended up getting caught. While I knew about these behaviors because I was part of the network, the police did not. I think this is because they were too far removed from the network and trying to look at it from a birds-eye view. They sure ended up missing a lot of crime, especially when it came to drugs.

Finally, two different strategies for going about a deviant search are described: a.) the "closing in" method and b.) the "following a path" method (p.12-14). Which path, if any, did you go about in planning the path your "small world" folder would travel to eventually reach the target? Can you compare your methodology to either of the two? Which strategy do you think would be best for that experiment?

Rogers' chapter discusses opinion leaders and their role in the diffusion of information and spread of innovations. Opinion leaders influence the rate of adoption of an innovation in a system and create the critical mass of adopters (p.300). A few models were discussed and their flaws exposed, such as the "Hypodermic Needle Model" which ignores the role of opinion leaders (p.303) and the "Two-Step Flow Model" which is far too simplified to describe the flow of communication (p.304-305).

Not surprisingly, "the exchange of ideas occurs most frequently between individuals who are alike, or homophilous" (p.305). And although "homophily and effective communication breed each other", there are also some negative aspects to information flow throughout homophilous groups (p.306). "Homophily accelerates the diffusion process, but limits the spread of an innovation to those individuals connected in a close-knit network" (p.306). These homophilous ties and communication links will lead to new ideas spreading horizontally in a network rather than vertically (p.307). Heterophilous communication links must be present for the diffusion process to ultimately occur.

Four methods for measuring opinion leadership were explored in this article. While I thought the first two were fairly accurate measuring techniques (sociometric and informants' ratings), the last two (self-designating and observation) presented some obvious problems in my mind. For the self-designating technique to work, people have to accurately identify and report their image and role in society. I feel like this is a highly inaccurate form of measurement. People are not likely to see themselves the way others do in a social context. And within this method there is no provision for the checks and balances feature that the previous two methods implore. Conversely, the observation technique is likely to work for small samples, like their bartender example, but I don't see it working on a larger scale. People other than the opinion leaders themselves are not likely to have this bird's eye view of their community and any trained observer is only likely to observe a small sub-set of the larger and more diverse network. Ultimately I agree with Rogers that using two or three of these measuring techniques is probably the best way to get accurate results.

Rogers also delves into the characteristics of opinion leaders (p.316-318). While reading this part, the characteristics described painted a picture in my mind of the typical politician. Do you think politicians are likely to be opinion leaders, and why or why not? If not, what role do they play in society that is similar to that of opinion leaders? Describe the similarities and differences.

In thinking about how and where opinion leaders and followers come into contact with each other (p.325), how do you think the increase in privatization of our society has changed the role/location/mode of communication between opinion leaders and followers, if at all?

Rogers also talks about the notion of "critical mass" and how this level occurs at "the point at which enough individuals in a system have adopted an innovation so that the innovation's further rate of adoption becomes self-sustaining" (p.343). Examples of the fax and the internet are discussed. Rogers notes that "the concept of the critical mass is fundamental to understanding a wide range of human behavior because an individual's actions often depend on a perception of how many other individuals are behaving in a particular way (p.349). I really liked this quote because it relates to many social behaviors/norms and the societal pressure that drives people to behave in these ways.

One point I didn't whole-heartedly agree with was how the concept of network externalities doesn't apply to the diffusion of cellular phones. While yes, at first, "mobile phone adopters [were] connected to the existing base of all telephone users" (p.350), I still think it's important to take into account that with today's benefits of endless mobile-to-mobile minutes of users signed up for the same company's service, this might make externality an issue. Network externality is defined as "a quality of certain goods and services such that they become more valuable to a user as the number of users increases" (p.350). In essence, my Cingular cell phone quality goes up as others sign up for Cingular phones as well, making my cell phone bill go down. I'm not sure if this makes perfect sense, or is exactly what is meant by this concept, but I thought it might be an interesting extension. What other examples with other new media can you think of where overcoming the externality problem might be an issue if looked at under current conditions?

Overall I found this article very thought-provoking and interesting to read. I've read about opinion leaders in the past and think it very appropriate to explore this issue in depth in our social networking class.

Burt's article makes the claim that opinion leaders are more like brokers for two main reasons: their influence is between rather than within groups, and they are a transition between the two network mechanisms responsible for contagion (cohesion and equivalence) (p.50). This betweenness lands them at the edge of things instead of at the top, as argued by the previous article. He says that cohesion “refers to the strength of the relationship between ego and altar”, and refers to structural equivalence (or just "equivalence") as the “ego's and alter's having similar relationships with other people” (p.39). Both equivalence and cohesion "predict contagion between people who are strongly tied to one another (cohesion) and similarly tied to persons beyond themselves (equivalence)" (p.40-41). Burt's use of examples throughout the paper makes it easy to understand these terms. He gives us three examples - physicians, officers, and lobbyists – to show us the differences between these two terms and when one is likely to trump the other. In conclusion, cohesion has a role to play and is essential to contagion when equivalence is ambiguous (p.44), but in general, equivalence dominates cohesion in all three examples (p. 45-46).

Opinion leaders are defined in this piece as "people whose conversations make innovations contagious for the people with whom they speak" (p.46). Their influence is limited to people who are somewhat equivalent and is "superfluous to contagion between strongly equivalent people" (p.46). Beyond that, "within groups contagion is by equivalence" and across groups "cohesion matters" (p.46). Applied to innovation diffusion, "contagion by cohesion through opinion leaders gets information into a group; then contagion by equivalence triggers adoptions within the group" (p.47).

Burt also discusses the social capital advantages of this opinion broker in the last part of his article (p.48). He talks about taking advantage of other's structural holes by spanning those holes with one's own relationships by acting essentially as a bridge (p.48-49). By doing this, the broker has a "disproportionate say in whose interests are served by the bridge" and it is this power that gives him/her the competitive advantage (p.49). Research shows that "opinion leaders tend to have the expected correlates of social capital, namely, higher levels of education, higher incomes, and greater mobility" (p.50). This made me wonder if someone who wasn't of high SES could ever be an opinion leader. Can you think of any examples in history where one’s social capital might be low, yet this opinion broker status was obtained?

1.)
Overall, using all new media, the 5 people I interacted with most often:

Jay (68 interactions)


Mom (28 interactions)


Jackie M. (9 interactions)


Abe (9 interactions)


Eden (7 interactions)

The 5 people I interacted with most often via cell phone :
Jay (62 interactions)
Mom (24 interactions)
Jackie M. (8 interactions)
Abe (7 interactions)
Eden (6 interactions)

The 5, or rather 7, people I interacted with most often via email:
Jay (6 interactions)
Mom (4 interactions)
Jackie N. (4 interactions)
Dad, Jenna, Abe, & Mallory (2 interactions each) - a tie for 4th and 5th place between
these 4 people

The only person I interacted with via IM:
Jackie M. (1 interaction)

The only person I interacted with via Facebook messaging :
Caitie (1 interaction)

My top interactions and my relationship/tie to them:
Jay: He is my boyfriend and best friend which may describe the frequency of our interactions. I listed him as a close tie. I've known him for 3.5 years and he lives over 1,000 miles away in Pensacola, Florida.
Mom: Although this relationship may be rather obvious (parent), I will mention that I've known her for 21 years, she is considered a close tie of mine, and lives over 4,000 miles away in Anchorage, Alaska.
Jackie M.: She is my Penn friend of one year, also a close tie, and lives on campus.
Abe: He is my ex-boyfriend and church friend of 3.5 years. He lives on campus and is a close tie.
Eden: She is my sorority sister and Penn friend of 1 year. She lives on campus and is a close tie. She is also one of my two "littles" and is originally from Fairbanks, Alaska, although we met here.
Jackie N.: She is my soccer team-mate of one year. She lives on campus and is a moderate tie.
Dad: He is my parent who I've known for 21 years and is considered a strong tie. He lives over 4,000 miles away in Anchorage, Alaska.
Jenna: She is my soccer team-mate of 2 months and is a moderate tie. She lives on campus.
Mallory: She is my sorority sister of one year and is a weak tie of mine. She lives on campus.
Caitie: She is my friend from home of 20 years and is a close tie of mine. She currently lives in California and is Korean, although adopted by Caucasian parents at birth.

2.)
Medium of Communication & ...

Strength of tie: I was more likely to use multiple mediums with my strong ties than I was with my moderate and weak ties (the "not close" category). I found that the weaker ties had less new media overlap, and that I used 4 new media devices (cell phone, email, IM, and Facebook messaging) to communicate with my close ties as opposed to two new media devices (cell phone and email) to communicate with my moderate to weak ties. I communicated through more than one medium with 1/2 my close ties, 1/8 of my moderate ties, and 1/5 of my weak ties. This overlap suggests multiplexity of communication devices with my close ties compared to the other two categories. Wellman and Wortley say, "We define a strong tie as one that has at least two of the characteristics of intimacy, voluntariness, and multiplexity (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.566). Many of my strong ties had all three of these components. In addition "multiplexity exists when a tie between two or more people encompasses multiple activities or topics of conversation rather than a single activity or shared topic. Studies show that multiplexity increases tie strength" (Mesch & Talmud, 2006, p.139). This is important because multiplexity and tie strength feed off of and reinforce each other in a reciprocal process.

According to Wellman, strong ties tend to be very homophilous. People tend to form "homogeneous networks of people with similar attitudes and lifestyles" (Wellman, 1999, p.31). Granovetter also states that "the stronger the tie connecting two individuals, the more similar they are, in various ways" (Granovetter, 1973, p.1362). However, Jay, my strongest tie from this new media experiment, differs from me in race, gender, age, location, religion, etc. On the other hand Burt says that "strong relations and mutual relations tend to develop between people with similar social attributes such as education, income, occupation, and age" (Burt, 1993, p.72). The fact that Jay and I both attended Penn, majoring in the same subject, says a lot about our similar education and interests. Also, as additional measures of tie strength we must also consider "duration and frequency of contact" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears, 2006, p.357). These become important in that Jay and I met on my first day of class freshman year and therefore have one of the longest relationships I've formed here at Penn. We also interact via new media very frequently, indicating our strength of relationship is currently strong and lasting.

Granovetter says that weaker interracial ties can be seen to be more effective in bridging social distance (Granovetter, 1973, p.1369). Jay, although Korean, is far more similar to me and does not bridge the social distance for me into the Asian race. Most of his friends are White, not Asian, and therefore he does nothing to bridge my structural network holes existing between these two groups. The understanding of why close ties can never be bridges has never been clearer. Close ties only bring you back to those you already know, thus re-emphasizing the impossibility of the “forbidden triad”.

Support exchanged: Companionship was exchanged through all four new media channels. Emotional aid, small services, information, and "making plans to meet up" were exchanged through only cell phone and email media. Beyond that, pre-med support/advice and job information were exchanged through only cell phone interaction.

I used Wellman and Wortley’s definitions of various "dimensions of support" to guide my classifications of the type of support provided and given during my new media interaction diary (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.562-563). Over the course of the week I realized how little emotional aid was transferred (4 interactions), and how I relied solely on my parents and boyfriend for small services (12 interactions). This result follows Wellman and Wortley’s finding that “strong ties also provide significantly more small services” (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.566). I relied mostly on my boyfriend for companionship, yet only sought this three times from my mom, who was my second most frequent interaction. This result is in agreement with Wellman and Wortley's findings regarding the parent/child relationship. They note, "The parent/child bond is the most supportive of all role types. It is also broadly supportive, usually providing all dimensions of support except companionship" (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.573). I found this to be true in my new media interactions as well.

Wellman and Wortley also found that "respondents appear to get most of their social support – of all kinds – through their small number of strong ties" (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.566). I also found that I relied on a small number of people in my life for a large amount of different services and various forms of support. My findings also followed Wellman and Wortley's in that "strong ties provide broader support than weaker active ties, significantly more emotional aid, minor services, and companionship" (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.566) and also that "strong ties are also more likely to provide companionship" (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.567).

Wellman and Wortley state, "Physical access promotes small and large services" (Wellman & Wortley, 1990, p.569). However, I only exchanged small services with two of my closest ties who lived furthest away, and didn’t exchange large services at all. This is counter to what they found in 1990 and may be due to the changing role of community and the lessening importance of proximity in relationships. McPherson et. al. discuss the "shift away from ties formed in neighborhood and community contexts" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Brashears, 2006, p.353).
It seems for me the small service has changed from borrowing a cup of sugar to reading over my med-school applications and making corrections via email.

Type of relationship: Communicating with friends from home was done only through the Facebook messaging medium. Communicating with Penn friends was done through cell phone, email, and IMing media. I interacted via cell phone and email with my boyfriend, sorority sisters, ex-boyfriends, tutees, parents, soccer team-mates, church friends, and bosses. I only interacted with advisors/admissions staff via cell phone use, and communicated with professors/teachers/TAs and random people through email.

According to Fischer, "Kin...tend to be of the same race, religion, and national origin…" (Fischer, 1982, p.6). Along those same lines, there seems to be "strong homophily on race and ethnicity in a wide array of relationships, ranging from the most intimate bonds of marriage and confiding, to the more limited ties of schoolmate friendship" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.420). Further, "only 8% of adults with networks of size two or more mention having a person of another race with whom they “discuss important matters,” less than one seventh the heterogeneity that we would observe if people chose randomly from that population" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.420). This was really shocking to me and counter to the types of relationships I observed among my close ties and even between my close ties. Although my mom and dad are of the same race, they are not followers of the same religion. Similarly, Jay and I are neither of the same race nor same religion. I just thought this was an interesting finding and one that I guess makes me part of the rare 8%.

According to McPherson et. al. "ties between people with the same religion are more likely to be close ties" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.425). Beyond that, there is likely to be religious homophily among one's close ties (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.425). According to my results only 4 of my 12 strong ties were of my same religion, a result I found surprising. 3 of my 16 moderate ties were also of my same religion. Overall, only 7 out of the 34 people I interacted with via new media were of my same religion.

Duration of relationship: The Penn friend I interacted with via IM has been my friend for 1 year. The friend from home I interacted with via Facebook messaging has been my friend for 20 years. Both my phone and email interactions had ranges of today - 21 years. However, taking an average over the duration of my relationship to those with whom I communicate by phone the mean value is 3.8, while the average duration of my relationship to individuals with whom I communicate via email is only 3.3. This was surprising because this included 1 extra "today" tie to cell phone use over email (a relationship duration of zero).

In the Ellison et. al. article, it states that students are “significantly more likely to use Facebook for fun and killing time than for gathering information" (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2006, p.20). It also talks about the fact that maintaining connections to former high school classmates is a likely motivation for student's use of Facebook since many of them listed their high school in their profiles (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2006, p.21). I ask, what about childhood friends from home who moved away before we even reached junior high? I find that Facebook is a great way to keep in contact with them and in fact that is what Caitie was to me. She was my best friend since I was 1 year old and moved away when I was 6. Even though we were young, we remained the best of friends until even today, visiting each other on a yearly or every other year basis. I have two other friends similar to this (moved away before high school) who I am less close with but still I communicate with via Facebook messaging. It makes me wonder if there is a distancing factor there that is not in email that makes us able to talk to these people we haven't seen in over 15 or so years. The fact that I only used Facebook messaging once during the week also indicates I'm probably using it more for pleasure than for communication. In accordance with what they found in their Facebook study, I think "online social networks help maintain relations as people move from one offline community to another" (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2006, p.32).

I also wanted to briefly mention that an important person with whom I share an extremely close tie and discuss important matters with on a weekly basis (Leisl) was left off of my new media diary because she is serving a mission for the church right now and is prevented from using all new media. During the course of the week I wrote her 4 letters. Although prevented from interacting as often as new media would allow, the strength of our relationship has not decreased and I thought this was a good example of how duration of our relationship is a huge indicator of our tie strength, regardless of a lack of some of the other measures.

Distance: The Penn friend I interacted with via IM lives on campus (OC) and the Facebook message friend from home lives 3000 miles away. The differences between cell phone and email media were not as clear. Both were used to communicate with people who lived both on campus and far away. The only clear difference was that email was used to communicate with individuals who lived in Philadelphia yet not on campus (1-20 miles away), while I did not use my cell phone to interact with these people.

Wellman states that "communities are not as local as they used to be" (Wellman, 1999, p.27).
It seems that contemporary communities are "fragmentary, sparsely knit and loosely bounded, they are rarely local groupings of neighbors and kin" (Wellman, 1999, p.26). This was definitely true for many of my kin and close ties who I interact with on a daily basis. But although he states that "most members of their personal communities do not lie in the same neighborhood" (Wellman, 1999, p.26), I think as Penn students we have the unique opportunity of living in a location-based community. With the advent of "new technologies like print, the telegraph, the telephone, and e-mail" we may "have loosened the bounds of geography by lowering the effort involved in contact, but these new modes have certainly not eliminated the old pattern" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.430). That is probably the best way to sum up the Penn community, although I'm not sure if it will still hold true once we graduate and move out of such a tightly-knit community, living in a confined space.

In Baym and Zhang's study they found that “email was considered superior to the telephone for keeping in touch with people who lived far away and in different time-zones” (Baym & Zhang, 2004, p.303). I did not find this to be true in my new media use. I used the telephone much more than email, including my use with people who lived in different time-zones. They also "found that locally, the telephone was used most. In long-distance relationships, email predominated” (Baym & Zhang, 2004, p.303). Again, I didn't find the long-distance finding to be true in my case, although I was more likely to use telephone with people who lived extremely close to me (on campus), but not beyond the campus borders yet still in Philly. For this region I used predominantly email.

Age: The Penn friend I interacted with via IM is 21 years old, while the friend from home I interacted with via Facebook messaging is 22 years old. Because I did not know the ages of two of the people I interacted with via phone I will exclude them from my results below. The age range of those I communicated with via cell phone was 20-57 while the age range for those I communicated with via email was 19-57. The average age of the individuals with whom I interacted via cell phone was 26.8 while the average age for those with whom I communicated via email was 27.0.

"In studies of close friendship, homophily on age can be stronger than any other dimension (excepting perhaps race)" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.424). Of all the 21-year olds that I interacted with, all were female (6, 21-yr. old females). Of these six girls, only 2 were close ties. This indicates that the majority of my close ties are not my age.

Gender: I was almost equally likely to interact with a male vs. female via email (10:12); however, via phone I was almost two times as likely to interact with a female (12:7). These numbers are based on the people with whom I interacted and not the frequency of my interactions with them. Looking at frequency of interaction over all new media, I had 100 interactions with males (over half of these with my boyfriend) and only 72 interactions with females (almost half of these with my mom).

McPherson et. al. find that "by the time that [people] are adults, [they] have friendship and confidant networks that are relatively sex-integrated" (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001, p.423). This was definitely true in my case, as I had close ties of both gender. Only via cell phone (and IMing and Facebook messaging technically if you want to count those 2 minor interactions) was I more likely to interact with my same gender.

Role of new media in our social networks:

From looking at my new media interactions I would agree with Wellman when he says that "people easily maintain far-flung ties by telecommunications (with telephones recently being joined by faxes, electronic mail, and the Web)" (Wellman, 1999, p.26). We are also gaining greater control over our interactions with people. "Over time we become responsible; we decide whose company to pursue, whom to ignore or to leave as casual acquaintances, whom to neglect or break away from" (Fischer, 1982, p.4). We begin to take "active roles in making choices about how to engage technologies" (Baym & Zhang, 2004, p.302), and "tend to build networks composed of others very similar to [ourselves] in background, position, personality, and way of life" (Fischer, 1982, p.6). We use each new media to supplement the close ties that we want to maintain. For this reason, in today's world, community networks "contain high proportions of people who enjoy each other and low proportions of people who are forced to interact with each other because they are juxtaposed in the same neighborhood, kinship group, organization, or workplace" (Wellman, 1999, p.31).

3.)
Home: Overall, I interacted with 34 different people during the week in which I recorded my new media use. I interacted with 31 out of those 34 people at home in my dorm room (7 of which I also interacted with in a public place at some point during the week). Because most of my interactions occurred at home, I spoke to pretty much all of my weak, moderate, and close ties in this location.

"Community interactions have moved inside the private home – where most entertaining, phone-calling and emailing takes place – and away from chatting with patrons in public spaces such as bars, street corners and coffee shops" (Wellman, 2001, p. 233-234). I definitely saw this to be true in my new media use.

Mobile phones provide instant “person-to-person communication” (Wellman, 2001, p.239), de-emphasizing the importance of place even more as we “don’t even know where [the person we call is] in physical or social space when [we] talk to them on a cell phone” (Wellman, 2001, p.239). However, the fact that I was often using my cell phone at home suggests that it was a substitute for a basic landline phone, and that if I had had one, I wouldn't be using my cell phone as much at home.

Public Places: I interacted with 10 of my 34 contacts in public places. 7 of those people I also communicated with at home. 5 of these 7 were close ties, 1 was moderate, and the other was a weak tie. Of the 3 people with whom I only shared a "public place" interaction, 2 were moderate ties and the other was a weak tie. I found this result quite interesting. While it seems I am indiscriminate with the people I communicate with inside the home, I communicate far less often and with less people in public places. It's not surprising that all of my top 5 overall interactions listed at the very top of the page are close ties and were all people I ended up talking to both at home and in public places. This is consistent with the previously mentioned finding that multiplexity and strong ties are related. It is likely that I feel comfortable talking to these close ties wherever I am.

How new media may change the composition of our social networks:

My results are consistent with the increasing trend toward privatization in our society. As "people show up at their email in-boxes and listen in on the happenings of their communities, interjecting when appropriate, but often just observing" (Hampton, 2004, p.226), community will move inside, into the private home (Wellman, 1999, p.28).

It will become ever more easy for people to "participate within the comfort and safety of their own homes or offices for any length of time they choose, and at their own convenience" (Wellman & Gulia, 1999, p.344) creating a community that never needs to leave home. This "absence of well-used public spaces and nearby community members means that people cannot go out into the neighborhood to find much community" (Wellman, 1999, p.29) even if they are the minority who want to go out and find it. This is evident in that given there is a student on Penn's campus who doesn't own a cell phone, they would likely be one lonely soldier amidst the chaotic crowd on Locust Walk. Forget meeting new people in public places and buy a cell phone!

Kleinberg and Lawrence discuss the structure of the Web and its four components - the core, upstream, downstream, and the tendril regions. They state, "The web contains a large, strongly connected core in which every page can reach every other by a path of hyperlinks" (p.1849). Previously, the Web was thought of as lacking structure and organization, but recently these beliefs have changed. For someone like me who's not too computer-savvy, I found this article a little difficult to grasp, such as when they discuss the distribution of hyperlinks and its relation to the power law. But I did like their analogy relating communities to "a collection of pages in which each member page has more links to pages within the community than to pages outside the community" (p.1850). Never before have we had the knowledge and communication to be able to chart and analyze "interests and relationships within society, as reflected in the Web's content and hyperlinks" like we have today (p. 1850). They talk about this importance in bringing people with common interests together and lowering the barriers to communication (p.1850). I definitely think this lowering of the barriers to communication is one of the greatest things the Web has done for people across the world. In today's world it is easy to find a group, or even just a website of information, about your own interests. These better search engines and directories will only continue to improve communication.

Marks' article talks about the current situation we have where people are publicly disclosing information on internet sites about themselves and the possible future ramifications of this. He talks about the Pentagon's National Security Agency and how they are working toward building "extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals" (p.1). The fact that they are logging phone calls and tapping the web to complete these personal profiles really hit home for me. It made me want to take my profile off of Facebook and urge my friends to do the same. I especially didn't like the idea that "you should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resume" (p.1). I think I always thought I was safe using Facebook because you needed an official university email account from one of the selected schools participating in Facebook, but that isn't true anymore. And besides, I never thought about it before, but I bet if the government can tap into our phone lines, they can probably also get a university email address.

Although I'm all for the benefits this information could have for scientists as stated on page 2, I agree that this information is dangerous as it could "sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice" (p.2). I think it is scary to know that they can trace our calls to know where we are due to the base station a call came from and what purchases we make (p.1). Marks is right on when he says, "Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button" (p.3). Was anyone else scared by this? Assuming we are good, upstanding citizens, what are the possible negative effects of this for us? Do you think there are more positive or negative effects to this mass collection of information and profiling? Do you think it would replace racial profiling?

Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe discuss the role of Facebook on college campuses. I loved this article and could relate to it in so many ways. They talk about college students' "heavy usage patterns" (p.1), and I would say that is probably even an understatement. Although I've been a member for 2.5 years, I don't think it will ever become a boring task to log onto Facebook, check up on my friends, and stalk new people who I don't yet know. (note- I use stalk very liberally and not in a creepy way). The best part about this online community is that profiles can be and are updated almost every day. They are constantly changing, renewing the excitement of this site daily.

I was surprised to hear that "popular press coverage has focused almost exclusively on the negative repercussions of Facebook use" (p.2). I haven't heard of any racist or problematic content posted on users' profiles, which makes me think these cases are far and few between. What did ring true was the fact that people are using Facebook to connect with "those outside their pre-existing social group or location" (p.4). Suddenly forgetting someone's name who you just met at a party loses its likelihood of becoming a future embarrassing situation. You can easily look that person up based on any one of that person's interests, his residential location, classes he's taking, or simply his picture that you can find by searching broad indicators first such as graduating class, sex, etc. Before Facebook you may have forgotten that person, but with it, you are likely to add them to your weakly-linked "friends" category and recognize them and know a little about them the next time you run into them. As stated on page 27, "connections are initially made offline and then migrate online, where they can be maintained easily and perhaps deepened in part due to the depth of personal information provided by the site".

I also liked how they discussed social capital, and more specifically high school social capital (p.10). Facebook allows us to maintain our ties from high school, weak or strong, and keep up on the lives of our friends even without them knowing it. By adding your high school to your profile, you automatically become part of that community again and are enabled to maintain those ties over long distances and time. When I first joined Facebook, I remember thinking how cool it was that I could maintain these ties and always have at my disposal recent pictures and contact information of my weak and strong high school ties.

In the end they found that, not surprisingly, just about all students were using Facebook. If older students weren't using it, it was probably due to the "recency with which the MSU Facebook community began" (p.19). I also liked the finding that students were "likely to use Facebook for fun and killing time" rather than "for gathering information" (p.20). I feel like I, and anyone else who uses Facebook, could've told them that and saved them a lot of time and money. A lot of the findings were interesting, but not significant, due to the relatively few number of people from the study that didn't use Facebook. It was difficult to compare the two groups based on their asymmetry in size, and I feel like they should try to study this at a school where the two groups are more similar in size, or do a study involving multiple schools across the US. This may solve some of their "significance" problems.

Do you think people are concerned with the amount of information posted on their own Facebook profile and are using the privacy settings more now that Facebook has expanded? How do you feel about employers having access to your Facebook profile and pictures?

Wellman's article was the longest and most diverse of the four articles we read. His article concerns the "rapid emergence of computer-mediated communications" and the idea that "cyberplaces are joining with relations on the ground" (p.228). He also addresses how the development of this computer-supported community will affect one's access to resources (p.228).

In discussing "globalized connectivity," he briefly mentions the spread of wireless towers to physically isolated and impoverished 'fourth world' areas (p.230). This idea caused me to stop reading and contemplate this issue. First of all, is it really plausible that impoverished countries would have cell phones before they would have food? And secondly, if we could all of a sudden talk to starving people in Africa, would this make us more aware of our extremely fortunate situation and more likely to give donations and help them? How would this change us, if, at all?

The second thing that caught my attention while reading this article was the idea that communication devices "should soon be able to provide personalized responses on voicemail and email to specific individuals" (p.231). But will this help us become more personalized, or not? I feel like this may only lessen the physical interactions we have with others. It will be interesting to see where technology goes during the rest of my lifetime.

Also, the idea of "mobile-ization" was also interesting in how it transforms place-to-place communication into person-to-person communication (p.239). Although it may make it easier to get in contact with a specific individual, it becomes difficult to "know where they are in physical or social space when they talk to them on a cell phone" (p.239).

Although there is way too much in this article to mention everything, one last idea that I found really fascinating was the idea of role-to-role relationships. The article notes, "These relationships are between fragments of selves, rather than between whole selves" (p.244). It also states, "People often prefer some relationships to be specialized" (p.245). In thinking about my own relationships I discovered that I have very few "whole friends". By this I mean that most of my relationships are formed around specialized needs or interests. I would say even my parents are becoming a specialized relationship, offering me small and large services and relatively little emotional support now that I'm older. Before even reading the paragraph that follows, I thought of my boyfriend, and how he is probably one of the very few people in my life that probably sees the whole picture of my personality and identity. In the next paragraph, Wellman obviously knew where this would lead people by stating, "if role-to-role connectivity becomes even more specialized, who, besides spouses, will worry about the whole person?" (p.245).

Kronholz's article about the experience of a young girl's science fair project is very intriguing. Even in 2003, I remember receiving chain letters and automatically deleting them. Shannon Syfrett's story is interesting though, because like her, I never would have guessed she would've received so many responses. She expected she "might get 2000 or 3000" (p.1) but turned out receiving 160,478 emails, and that was only before she ended the study 17 days early. I like the comment by Symantec Corp. which states that "the only difference between a chain e-mail and a computer virus is intent" (p.2). Although I'm not sure I agree with that statement whole-heartedly (since viruses cause a lot more damage), I think the idea is important. It was a nice idea for her to do this project, and I'm actually glad someone did it back then when people maybe weren't as likely to just delete it, since I don't think the response rate would be nearly as high today. Maybe I'm wrong, but with the risk of opening something that could harm your computer, I just don't think people are as likely to even open the letter in today's society. Even if they do, it is unlikely they will believe the story of the sender or respond in any case. Some of the messages that the respondents wrote were pretty hilarious though and it kind of makes me want to be the Lois Weisberg of the internet and start a chain letter and develop ties across the world.

The article states, "chain letters can live eternally" (p.2). Could someone who wanted to repeat Shannon's experiment improve it so the same problems didn't occur? If so, what do you think they could do?

Wellman and Gulia discuss the online community that has developed and attempt to answer seven questions relating to the environment and relationships that one experiences in this virtual community. Although there are competing views about whether computer-mediated communication will create a new kind of community or destroy community altogether, most of the evidence leans toward the positive side the issue. Sociologists are now beginning to realize that, like other past connectors, communities can "exist as social networks of kin, friends, and workmates who do not necessarily live in the same neighborhoods" (p.333). Many argue that the internet is not replacing human contact but rather adding to the face-to-face relationships that already exist and fitting in with other aspects of people's lives (p.334).

In one way, the "Internet has continued the trend of technology fostering specialized relationships" (p.336), but some argue that this is a positive trend, providing supportive emotional and peer-groups for people seeking more anonymous ways to receive help that they may not ordinarily seek out. Barlow points out, "I didn't have to give up the human embrace in order to have [the cyberkiss/cyberhug]... one supplemented the other" (p.339). I think it's important to realize that the internet is a supplemental tool and doesn't replace human contact for most people. I think if people believed this more, maybe there wouldn't be such negative feelings toward Internet relationships.

The article also talks about the idea of strangers and the fact that Net-users trust them "much like people gave rides to hitchhikers in the flower-child days" (p.341). Although the argument centers around the fact that people hardly know any information about these "strangers", I would tend to argue that this aspect of online interactions is changing. More than ever sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others ask people to not only create profiles of themselves, but also generally to add a picture. How, if at all, do you think this is changing the nature of interactions among Net-users? Do you think it will lead to less diverse online social networks?

I liked the idea that was raised about the Net encouraging the expansion of community networks (p.351). I think it is really relevant to our lives as college students. I can't count the number of daily emails I receive informing me of various internship opportunities, on-campus jobs, research opportunities. I feel like these are small services that friends just wouldn't take the time to tell each other about if it weren't so easy to push the "forward" button. The internet, more than any other media, has expanded our networks and aided us in information transmission. Through these indirect links, we become connected to a more diverse network than if we could only communicate by word of mouth.

Baym, Zhang, and Lin discuss the use of Internet of college students and compare it to other media in maintaining both local and long-distant relationships. They find that in long-distant relationships, the internet is used nearly as much as the telephone and more than face-to-face conversation. However, for more intimate relationships, "people were more likely to use face-to-face conversations and telephone calls" (p.314). Local relationships were maintained primarily through face-to-face conversations and least likely through the internet (p.313-314). Another interesting finding was that, against previous notions of the internet satisfying a task-interaction role, internet interactions were slightly more likely to be identified as social rather than face-to-face conversations and telephone calls (p.314). This kind of makes intuitive sense when you think about it though since not all face-to-face encounters are likely to be avoidable and may actually be more for task-related purposes, especially in college where studying and group projects are two main activities involving face-to-face encounters that are task-related.

I liked how the authors explore the idea of "users' active roles in making choices about how to engage technologies depending on their circumstances, personality traits, and needs" (p.302). I think this is important to remember before quickly judging a new medium as having a single purpose or even a single effect on people. For example, in looking at my daily loggings of new media usage for this class project, I can clearly see that the internet is much more an information transfer device than a way of socializing for me. Thus, individual differences are important to keep in mind.

For this study, the college students were asked to keep a diary, similar to ours, of all their daily interactions. However, there were two main differences between theirs and ours. They had to log all face-to-face interactions, but were only asked to report "significant social interactions, leaving it to them to determine what constituted significance" (p.304). I had mixed feelings about this because I feel like almost every conversation I have over the phone is insignificant. It is usually just to say hi to my boyfriend, catch my mom up on my life, etc. In looking at your own "New Media" diary, how do you think these two measures from this article would have changed this assignment for you?

Mesch and Talmud discuss adolescent use of the internet to form friendships that originate online. They look at online and offline networks in Israel since "little is known about the connection between Internet use and social relationships in non-English-speaking countries" (p.140). The adolescents who reported having friends they met online, were found to have "a most dispersed and heterogeneous network in terms of gender and age than those who did not have online friends" (p.140).

I found it interesting that "a higher proportion of adolescents who met their friend face-to-face than of adolescents who met their friend online discussed intimate issues" (p.142). Due to the anonymity factor, you would think the opposite would be true. As noted earlier, "The relative anonymity of the Internet reduces the risks of such disclosure, whereas disclosing intimate information to members of a face-to-face community can be embarrassing" (p.138). This seems to contradict their findings and common-sense notions of what would be discussed online. In the end, nonpersonal topics made up the majority of online interactions.

The results of the study indicated that "online friends were perceived as less close because of inadequate friendship duration and insufficient communicative multiplexity" (p.145). Although the study states that there are many studies similar to this one investigating the Western world's online friends, I wish they had compared the two in this article because I am left wondering how these findings may differ from my own environment and why.

Hampton's article claims that "the Internet may hold as much promise for reconnecting people to communities of place as it does for liberating people from them" (p.217). He argues that interests are what bind people together and that community can exist without propinquity because of this (p.219). The decline in social capital, observed by Putnam, "occurs too early to be associated with home computing or internet use", according to Hampton. And mobile phones may just as arguably account for people cutting themselves off from public spaces (p.219). Also, very few people actually admit to participating in "online communities" therefore making it unlikely that they have replaced real-world communities (p.220).

I thought it was interesting that in the Homenet study by Kraut et al. there were so many possible threats to the validity of the experiment. Some of these were the nonrandom sample, the frustration of learning something new like the Internet, and the WebTV factor. It's always important to remember these when considering the findings of any study. Hampton does a good job of pointing them out.

Hampton also discusses the Internet's potential to create increased local interaction. It does this through "its ability to be used as an asynchronous form of communication that can engage others not only one-on-one, but as a broadcast of one-to-many" (p.226). He says that "like a habitually-frequented hangout, people show up at their email in-boxes and listen in on the happenings of their communities, interjecting when appropriate, but often just observing" (p.226). I really liked how he put this because it's exactly how I feel about the Penn community. In keeping my "New Media" diary, I was concerned about not counting all the emails I read on a daily basis but never responded to. These don't count for our logs since we are not initiating or maintaining the interaction, but they are still so important for our student community here at Penn. They inform us of the daily activities and keep us aware even if we don't want to get involved.

Overall, I liked the two studies he gave as examples and the conclusions he draws from them. There are necessary barriers we still need to overcome, but I think his idea of local computer-mediated communication is a good one and something that could change existing views about Internet usage in the future.

The article by Wasserman and Faust discusses the definitions of centrality and prestige and how they relate to location on a graph and in one's social network. They present three graphs in which the nodes in the graphs are quite different. Although the star graph obviously presents the most central node out of all the nodes in all three graphs, the article poses the question, "does the center, or centroid, of a graph contain the most important actors?" (p.172). The answer lies in the definition of "important".

An actor is considered prominent if the ties of the actor make him visible to the other actors in the network (p.172). The two types of visibility are centrality and prestige (p.173). A prestigious actor is one who "is the object of extensive ties, thus focusing solely on the actor as a recipient" (p.174). It is a directional tie, where the ties are directed toward the actor. Actor centrality on the other hand is not particularly concerned with the direction, but rather is more concerned that "the actor is simply involved" (p.173).

Something I found very interesting was the use of "closeness" to measure an actor's centrality. The article notes that "as geodesics increase in length, the centrality of the actors involved should decrease" (p.184). The idea that centrality is inversely related to distance was a little counterintuitive to me at first. I thought that even if someone had only a few ties, yet those ties were bridges to other subgroups, this person could be a central figure without having to have short intermediary paths to everyone in his/her network. But I guess the idea of the star clarifies this since it is used as the example of being the shortest path linking the other nodes in the shortest possible path.

Although I could go on forever about this article since it was very detailed, I will only mention one more measurement that stood out to me - that of betweenness. When the authors noted that the "actor in the middle, the one between the others, has some control over paths in the graph" (p.188), it reminded me of when Burt said that structural holes are the setting for tertius (third person who benefits) strategies (or entrepreneurial strategies) (p.90). The idea of location being a key part to these graphs is important, I think, in understanding centrality and prestige as it relates to the power one gains from that position.

My question is this: The article indicates that "the betweenness indices can be quite different measures of actor centrality than degree- and closeness-based indices" (p.192), at least for the families studied. Which do you think is a more accurate predictor of actor centrality and why?

Freeman also discusses the idea of betweenness and its potential for control. He states that "when a person is strategically located on the communication paths linking pairs of others, that person is central" (p.221). A person in this position can either withhold or distort information in transmission or maintain communication between others. They also have potential as coordinators of group processes. He also notes that "a point that falls on some but not all of the geodesics connecting a pair of others has a more limited potential for control" (p.222).

With this idea in mind, I thought of the typical "popular crowd" of any given high school. It is interesting that although they may be prestigious, they probably wouldn't have much power over the information flow due to their lack of betweenness. This could contribute to the disproportionately large number of rumors that generally circulate about them and the little degree of control they have over it. Freeman notes, “A point is viewed as central to the extent that it can avoid the control potential of others” (p.224). In what case is the person who is most central likely to be the same person who is the most popular and vice versa? What would Freeman's idea of betweenness suggest about this?

Krebs' article talks about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and how their network was difficult to map out due to its members' hidden and dormant strong ties (p.10). These ties were sparse and distanced by many miles, yet extremely strong and only active at certain times to achieve goals. One part that caught my eye was on page 11 when it said, "the hijackers kept to themselves - they did not make friends outside the trusted circle". Although they were living in America for some time before these attacks, even their neighbors did not catch on to what they were about to do. This made me wonder whether we, as Americans, are less likely to notice terrorists (even if they were living next door to us) with social isolation on the rise. Do we consider it normal that they rarely interacted with others (outsiders)? Are our networks beginning to resemble theirs in exclusivity and sub-groupings whose structural holes between these groups are not bridged?

Valente, Unger, and Johnson discuss the effect of peer influence on the initiation of smoking behavior in adolescents. They note that "popular students will attempt to set trends while at the same time try not to deviate too much from the cultural norms of the group" (p.324). Therefore we can look toward popular students to both influence and reflect the group trends around them. They found that "popularity was associated with increased susceptibility to smoke and smoking" (326). This fit with my previous thoughts about what the outcome of this study would be partly because it makes sense that popular kids would try do something considered "socially cool" and partly because of my own observations from high school. From a communications perspective it makes sense why many of the advertisements directed toward today's youth try to a.) Show kids that it's not cool, and b.) Show them that it's not as socially normative in today's society.

I found the article by Mouttapa et. al. quite fascinating and intriguing. The fact that bullying in elementary schools is becoming a growing problem in the US was quite surprising, especially since it was, what I would consider, "at its prime" when I was in elementary school. The fact that 7-15% of the school-aged population represents bullies, while only 2-10% are victims, implies that there are a larger number of people exerting aggression over a much smaller number of victims. It is therefore likely that any victim will have more than one bully behaving aggressively toward him.

Although bullies are noted to have "higher peer-nominated scores on sociability and leadership relative to other students," (p.317), I would argue that their success is limited to their youth. Recently my mom sent me a newspaper article from home reporting an arrest of the young man who had once epitomized the word "bully" from elementary through high school. It made me wonder how many other "bullies" I had known that were now experiencing difficulties in life.

When I "Facebooked" the five I could remember, none of them showed up. Although it is possible that these highly "social and leader-like" kids could've grown up to become so anti-social as to not have created a Facebook account, I tend to think it's more likely that they never made it to college. So although the victims may have once experienced "academic difficulties... peer rejection... and learning difficulties" many of the victims I remembered surprisingly did have Facebook accounts. Not that Facebook is the end-all-be-all but I found this interesting and was wondering if any of you would find similar results. As noted in the limitations of the study, longitudinal studies would probably add much to our understanding of these node characteristics of bullies, victims, and their friends. Where these bullies and victims end up and what their future network structures look like is something I would be very interested in.

1.

Early on in the interview, Smith-Lovin is quick to point out the obvious - adults are spending more time out in the work force. In addition to this we are more dispersed and going to work often involves commuting. With more time spent at work, and those we spend time at work with living farther and farther away from us, it seems likely that when we come home from work each day, our spouse would be the one we would want to spend time with. This hypothesis agrees with the findings in the McPherson et. al. article that our core discussion networks are shifting away from ties formed in neighborhood and community contexts and toward conversations with close kin (especially spouses) (p.353). As Bott found in her study of Mr. and Mrs. N, one of the contributing factors to the high interconnectivity of their networks was the fact that Mr. N worked very close to home. He worked with the husbands of their neighbors, something that connected the spouses in their everyday social interactions. Today with men working far from home, and the likelihood of both husband and wife working outside the home (and not together in the same occupation), spouses have fewer common contacts and therefore tend to spend their time simply with one another.

Smith-Lovin also notes that one reason we may not be as likely to interact with our neighbors is because we may live in problematic neighborhoods. We may think it is dangerous to go out of our homes roaming the streets in an effort to meet all of our neighbors. More than fear, Putnam argues that in the past few decades people are shown to have less trust in government and media. Because of this, he argues, it is not that far off to assume that we trust our friends less as well.

One of the callers to the radio show, Andrea, also brought up the changes that have taken place in America's religious institutions, asking whether that may have had an impact on our core discussion networks. Putnam responded that 1/2 of all social contacts in America are religious. Smith-Lovin found a similar number (1/3) and emphasized the importance of religious institutions as the "breeding ground" for core discussion networks. They did not indicate whether it has been shown statistically that church-attendance decreased between 1985 and 2004 but I would tend to think that it has. Regardless, Smith-Lovin points out that even if people are members of the same number of groups now as they were back in 1985, we are definitely spending less time involved in and interacting with those groups. There could be many reasons for this, but the increased amount of time in the work-force is likely to be a contributing factor.

2.

In the radio broadcast Putnam says that while cell phones and email are important, cyber friends cannot bring you chicken soup. Wellman and Wortley would argue that these close friends who you discuss important matters with would likely provide resources such as companionship, small services, and emotional support. They may even provide larger services depending on the strength of the friendship. Wellman and Wortley note that "the aid that friends exchange depends on the strength of their relationships" (p.581).

The impact of this decrease in core discussion networks will be felt at both the personal and societal levels, says Smith-Lovin. At the personal level, these are people we are relying on for a number of different reasons. If our core discussion network narrows down to our parents and our spouse, and we know that our parents are likely to die before us, we may be left with only our spouse one day. And just to put it out there, she notes, our spouse could die too. This puts us dangerously close to becoming social isolates.

At the societal level, these core discussion networks are what tie our society together. She notes the danger that can come from the disintegration of these ties in times of community emergencies, such as Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana was listed as having one of the highest percentages of social isolation (42%), giving the people there no personal or collective safety nets with which to help shield them from the crisis.

As we turn to more homophilious ties, our access to other social clusters decreases, we are not connected to as many diverse people, and we are more likely to become not just social isolates but something almost just as bad - homophilious group cluster isolates. Although we may be heading down this path of less social capital (Burt), Granovetter might not see this as such a big deal. He might just say, "Go ahead and lose the spouse too. It's no big deal. Weak ties are much more important anyway!"