This paper lays out a theory that I have been developing about changes to the structure of community related to new technologies, particularly social media. I contend that the study of community has always been closely tied to understanding the social implications of communication technology. Our understanding of how these technologies have influenced community is based largely on what I have called the mobility narrative. The mobility narrative is the argument that communication and transportation technologies have made it progressively easier for people to overcome constraints of time and space. I argue that two characteristics of recent communication technologies – persistent contact and pervasive awareness – have the potential to break from this historic narrative and fundamentally change how social relations are organized.
Whereas previous communication technologies allowed people to communicate across distance with reduced time and cost, they generally lacked affordances for relational persistence and sustained awareness. That is, as a result of mobility, social ties were often lost at key life course events and as people moved over distances. New communication technologies often described as social media and including platforms such as Facebook provide for persistence by allowing people to articulate relationships and to maintain them over time. Social ties that previously would have been abandoned over the life course as we left high school, changed jobs, and moved from one neighborhood to another now persist online. Maintained through the ambient nature of social media, people have a new, pervasive awareness of the activities, interests, location, opinions, and resources of their social ties.
Visions of modern community often imagine a maximization of mobility to the point where people are nearly free from the constraints of time, space, and social bonds. In contrast, I have argue that persistent-pervasive community renews constraints and opportunities of traditional community structure. As a result of persistence — a counterforce to mobility — relationships and the social contexts where they are formed are less transitory than at any time in modern history. Through the ambient, lean, asynchronous nature of social media, awareness supplements surveillance with the informal watchfulness typified in preindustrial community. It provides for closeness and information exchange unlike what can be communicated through other channels. Social media and the algorithms behind them generate not only context collapse but an audience problem that, when managed through a dynamic balance between broadcasting and monitoring content, enhances indicators of awareness and availability of social ties. Persistent–pervasive community represents a period of metamodernity. It is a hybrid of preindustrial and urban-industrial community structures that will affect the availability of social capital, the success of collective action, the cost of caring, deliberation around important issues, and how lives are linked over the life course and across generations.
You can download the final version of the paper here, or access a draft version of the paper on my website.
I have a new paper published with my former PhD student Lauren Sessions Goulet and former undergraduate research assistant Garrett Albanesius. This work was recently featured by NYT Magazine in an article by Mark Oppenheimer.
Despite concerns that Americans are increasingly likely to live alone, that loneliness has increased, and that the mobile phone ‘by distracting us from those around us’ has led to the loss of conversation, today public spaces are a more likely source for interacting than they were three decades ago. Observations of nearly 150,000 people captured on film in four public places in 1979-80, and from video taken of the same places 30 years later, show that we are less alone and more together in public. Mobile phones, while seemingly always present, are used in public by a small number of people, who tend to linger in place, but rarely use their phones in groups. Other social changes have had a more meaningful impact on the use of public spaces. Women, whose participation in the workforce has increased by 44 percent since the early 1980s, have increased their use of public space. Men and women are spending more time in public together. These observations counter the suggestion that new technologies are responsible for a large scale shift in how people use public spaces, and that Americans are increasingly socially isolated.
In a comparison of pedestrians filmed in four public spaces located in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia at two time periods, 30 years apart, we found that the proportion of people in groups had increased relative to people who were alone. The early films, created by the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit planning and educational organization founded to expand on the work of William Whyte, when compared to recent videos, show a decline of 24 percent in the presence of people who were alone at the Met Steps in NYC, a 24 percent decline in singletons within Boston’s Downtown Crossing, and an 8 percent decline in people alone on the sidewalks outside of Bryant Park in NYC…
You can download the final version of the paper here, or access a draft version of the paper on my website.
I recently published this paper with my colleague Rich Ling (University of Copenhagen). This paper came about as a result of a dinner conversation where we realized that we had each collected data on core discussion networks, national samples from the United States, Norway and Ukraine, over the same time period. The perfect opportunity to add comparative data to a growing literature on core networks (including a number of my own studies), that had previously relied exclusively on a series of repeated cross-sectional samples of Americans. This literature suggests that there has been large-scale change in the size and structure of American’s core networks over the past two decades.
The goal of our paper was to test the theory that there was something unexpected or exceptional about a finding that American’s core networks are relatively small and kin-centric. Our expectation was that this was not something exceptional at all. Rather, we anticipated that at the societal level a large and diverse core networks was a sign of something troubling, the need for large amounts of informal support. Our expectation was that where formal resources were relatively limited (Ukraine), we would find larger and more diverse core networks. When formal resources were more robust, as a result of things like a strong economy, strong civic society, and strong government safety net (Norway and the US), people would have less need for informal support and could thus rely on a smaller core network. We argued that kin are more likely to persist in core networks; when the median core network size drops to one it should be of no surprise that kin dominate these networks. As we expected, Norwegians have relatively small and kin-centric core networks, and a similar level of social isolation as Americans. Along the way, we also challenge a number of related arguments: that higher levels of individual and societal well-being predict higher levels of face-to-face contact, that most people have less face-to-face contact when mediated communication is used with core confidants, and that the use of ICTs within core networks displaces core confidants.
We have three main findings:
- Concerns that low societal well-being is associated with smaller and less diverse core networks should be discounted. Arguments in favor of this position are based on an ecological fallacy that assumes that the positive relationship between individual well-being and core network size can be generalized to the societal level (that is, individual factors related to well-being, such as higher education, that predict larger and more diverse core networks, cannot be extended to conclude that societies with higher well-being should also average larger and more diverse core networks). This generalization is false; it ignores a network paradox. Unlike at the individual level, societal prosperity is negatively related to network size.
- For most people, frequent ICT use within core networks is associated with frequent face-to-face contact. However, as a result of an affordance paradox, there is an exception based on individual inequality. In the absence of new communication technologies, the most disadvantaged, individuals of lower socioeconomic status, have more frequent face-to-face contact with core ties (compared to those of higher socioeconomic status). In this context, face-to-face contact is lower with ICT use only for those of lower socioeconomic status.
- Social contact, in-person communication, and the use of ICTs support larger core networks. However, there is a contact paradox whereby, in a context of lower societal well-being, frequent contact with core networks, face-to-face and otherwise, impedes the ability to maintain a larger core network.
You can download the final version of the paper here, or access a draft version of the paper on my website.