Sunday, January 22, 2006

Community and Social Networks, Part One

What is the connection between community and social networks? According to Quan-Haase and Wellman (2002, p. 2), a community can be defined as "social networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity." When a community is understood this way, it is not limited to a village or town or other place in physical space. Moreover, one does not have to have face-to-face contact with other members of a community when it is a set of social networks.

The Internet is a collection of computer networks, and when the Internet connects people and organizations, it forms an "infrastructure of social networks" (Wellman and Hampton, p. 3). Thus, Wellman (Sept. 2001) contends that "computer networks are inherently social networks." As stated by Wellman in 1997 (pp. 185, 186):
Sitting in the privacy of their homes, people connect online with fellow members of newsgroups and other, usually specialized forms of virtual communities ... Such virtual communities inherently connect all directly with all — everyone can read all messages — but their size and fragmentation means that few members are strongly connected. Hence computer-supported social networks are not destroying community but are responding to, resonating with, and extending the types of community that have already become prevalent in the developed Western world.
Not all social networks are the same. Wellman (1997) considers six characteristics of social networks:
  1. Density, which refers to the extent and frequency of contact among all members. The greater the contact and frequency of contact among members, the greater the density.
  2. Boundedness, which "refers to the proportion of network members' ties that stay within the boundaries of the social network" (p. 187). Within tightly bounded networks almost all contact remains within the population.
  3. Range, which describes how large and diverse the population is within its boundaries. When social networks are dense and bounded, they tend to have a small range, that is there tends to be more homogenity in social characteristics of network members (p. 190).
  4. Exclusivity, which refers to the ability to contact other members of a community. The more exclusive social networks are, the less access members of a community have to each other.
  5. Social Control, which considers group pressure or "community influentials" that may create, constrain, and manage a person's contacts and exchanges (p. 194). There tends to be more social control in dense, bounded groups than sparce, unbounded ones.
  6. Strength of Relationships, which is a "multidimensional construct encompassing the usually correlated variables of a relationship's social closeness, voluntariness, 'multiplexity' (breadth), and to a lesser extent, frequency of contact" (p. 195). People with strong ties tend to offer each other more and a wider variety of social support in the form of "emotional aid, goods and services, companionship, and a sense of belonging" (p. 196).
In Part Two, I will explore how these 6 characteristics are used to consider differences in social networks and communities in cyberspace.

END OF PART ONE



BIBLIOGRAPHY:
  1. Quan-Haase, Anabel and Wellman, Barry. November 12, 2002. "How does the Internet Affect Social Capital?" Forthcoming in Marleen Huysman and Volker Wulf, Eds. IT and Social Capital.
  2. Wellman, Barry. September 14, 2001. "Computer Networks As Social Networks" in Science, Vol. 293, No. 14, pp. 2031-2034.
  3. ------------. 1997. "An Electronic Group Is Virtually A Social Network" in Culture of the Internet. Sara Kiesler, ed. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers; Mahway, New Jersey; pp. 179-208.
  4. ------------, and Hampton, Keith. 1999. "Living Networked On and Offline" in Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 6 (November), pp. 648-654.

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