Week 2 Reading
While Wellman manages to cover all sides of the argument for the existence of community in modern day, his main argument is that community and its meaning has changed with society. Wellman begins by address the issue of the past community versus the modern day community. Of coarse community has changed, hundreds of years ago even 50 years ago people were extremely dependent on each other, and the existence of a close-nit society was not only the norm but was necessary. Everyone is more independent now, this is no secret. I personally don’t understand how this can be looked as a critic on society; these people, who use history as the golden years, want to model modern society after the past. I believe that only when we are completely independent, when people no longer need the help of others, and when people choose to interact that creates a much closer society. A completely voluntary society, unlike the one’s of the past which more represented life on remote island forced to ask family and neighbors for help not by desire to interact but for mere survival. I believe that if we used the terminology from Peter Munge to describe the “golden years,” we would realize that actual strength of bonds between different nodes when forced bonds out of necessity are removed is actually more like and indirect connection when in comparison to linkages in modern day communities. However, this necessity shared in the past did create stability through a symmetrical relationship in which each node needed the other. I want credit to go to our modern community. Ours community is not built on necessity but out of desire, and from that desire forms stronger bonds. For example, if you gave a community 100 years ago infinite resources to live, do you believe that the community would remain as close? Of coarse not, the reason for the community has been stripped away. The large scale social changes that have been have destroyed the community and replaced it with a greater one; a community built for the individual to experience as he or she wishes.
Comments (1)
I see that you believe that today’s communities are formed out of a desire for voluntary social interaction and are therefore stronger than the communities of the past that were created out of necessity and the shared goal of survival. However, I don’t necessarily agree with this basis for community strength. For example, I would say that people who are on a remote island (literally and figuratively speaking) would develop a shared goal of survival and consequently feel a strong need for the help, resources, and support of the other people. Maybe such a goal is superficial, for the individuals are using each other for personal ends. Nevertheless, the type of necessary bonds formed in this kind of isolated community should nonetheless be stronger than transient, voluntary relationships.
To extrapolate further, I would even go as far to say that society puts a large emphasis on official marriages (rather than unions or cohabitating couples) because of the stability that comes with a “forced bond.” Initially, both marriages and non-marital relationships begin out of desire (for the most part, in America). However, the strength of the ties in a society based on marriages are seen as more permanent than the strength of the ties in a society with more transient, voluntary relationships.
To go even further with this idea of the strength of permanent/forced relationships, I think of a 1994 study by Burnstein, Crandall, and Kitayama that I learned about in my Social Psychology class. The researchers asked participants to imagine individuals asleep in different rooms of a burning house. The participants were then told that they could only save one of them. The researchers found that people were more likely to save people who were most closely genetically related to them. The researchers concluded that such action was based on a biological instinct to save people who have the most similar genes.
I take this analysis one step further. The relationships between the subjects and their family member were involuntary. (“You can’t choose your family.”) However, the decision to save these relatives is possibly more than just biology. It is probably that the social network connections between the subjects and their close family members are most likely strongest, a non-biological factor which could have resulted in the participants’ choice to save their family members.
Thus, I ask: Do you believe that physical needs or social needs play a larger role in determining the strength of bonds between nodes in a social network?
Posted by Mindy (r10) | September 13, 2006 10:54 PM
Posted on September 13, 2006 22:54