Neighborhoods in the Network Society the e-Neighbors study

This study examines whether the Internet is increasingly a part of everyday neighborhood interactions, and in what specific contexts Internet use affords the formation of local social ties. Studies of Internet and community have found that information and communication technologies provide new opportunities for social interaction, but that they may also increase privatism by isolating people in their homes. This paper argues that while the Internet may encourage communication across great distances, it may also facilitate interactions near the home. Unlike traditional community networking studies, which focus on bridging the digital divide, this study focuses on bridging the divide between the electronic and parochial realms. Detailed, longitudinal social network surveys were completed with the residents of four contrasting neighborhoods over a period of three years. Three of the four neighborhoods were provided with a neighborhood email discussion list and a neighborhood website. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to model over time the number of strong and weak ties, emailed, met in-person, and talked to on the telephone. The neighborhood email lists were also analyzed for content. The results suggest that with experience using the Internet, the size of local social networks and email communication with local networks increases. The addition of a neighborhood email list further increases the number of weak neighborhood ties, but does not increase communication multiplexity. However, neighborhood effects reduce the influence of everyday Internet use, as well as the experimental intervention, in communities that lack the context to support local tie formation.     

Upward contacts in everyday life: Benefits of reaching hierarchical relations in ego-centered networks

Recent studies have inspired inquiries about what circumstances allow people to gain from interactions with those who rank higher than themselves in the social hierarchy. We examine how self-reported benefits of such upward contacts vary by tie strength and network structures in everyday life. Data were drawn from contact diaries that 137 individuals recorded over seven months in 2014; these diaries captured unique features of 94,353 one-on-one contacts that 137 diary keepers made, along with the estimated tie strength and the extent of embeddedness among network members. Multilevel models with interaction terms show that diary keepers benefit from contacts with people who play higher hierarchical roles and that the benefits become more substantial when the higher-ranked others are weakly tied to the diary keepers and connected with fewer fellow network members. The paper extends contact diary studies to estimate alter-alter ties that help construct comprehensive structures in egocentric networks.     

Language variation on Internet Relay Chat: A social network approach

This paper examines linguistic variation on an Internet Relay Chat channel with respect to the hypothesis, based on the model of Milroy and Milroy (1992), that standard variants tend to be associated with weak social network ties, while vernacular variants are associated with strong network ties. An analysis of frequency of contact as a measure of tie strength reveals a structured relationship between tie strength and several linguistic variants. However, the variant features are associated with social positions in a way that does not correlate neatly with tie strength. An account of these results is proposed in terms of the social functions of the different variables and the larger social context of IRC affecting tie strength.     

Spatial distance and mobile business social network density

Following the increasing adoption of mobile communication, scholars have shown interest in the role of place on the structure of mobile social networks. The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between spatial distance and the closure and diversity of businesses mobile social networks. We used a database that aggregates actual mobile communication patterns of business users of a large Israeli cell phone company (n?= 16,199). Our findings, among a large sample of businesses, provide support for the place and mobile communication perspective. The results reveal a negative association between spatial distance and mobile business communication networks. As spatial distance between business network members increases, business social ties through mobile communication decreases. Furthermore, the results also revealed a negative association between spatial distance and mobile network density. As the spatial distance between business users increases, the density of the mobile communication network diminishes. Physical proximity promotes the development of dense business networks. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Positive and negative tie perceptual accuracy: Pollyanna principle vs. negative asymmetry explanations

We examine the affective content of ties and explore whether negative affective tie content is systematically advantaged or disadvantaged when recalling the social network as compared to positive affective tie content. We test this in three workgroups from two organizations and analyze differences in perceptual accuracy comparing negative and positive affective tie perception. We theorize that ego will be more accurate for others’ positive than negative ties due to generalized positivity bias, or the Pollyanna principle. We also theorize that ego will be more accurate for their own negative ties due to negative asymmetry perspective, as ego will attend more to those ties that pose a personal threat. Findings suggest that observers were more accurate overall about their own and others’ positive compared to negative affective ties. We conclude that the Pollyanna principle is an important factor in explaining perceptions in naturalistic cognitive networks. Supplementary analysis showed that negative ties were more likely to be missed and imagined and having a valenced tie toward another person influences perceptions of that persons’ network ties. Finally, we find that balanced and imbalanced triads were also important factors of relative accuracy. The study’s contribution, limitations, and future research are also discussed.     

Communicating Global Activism

Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns; the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties; transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks; and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.     

Social class,social networks and variety of weak and strong practices

Most research on the structural foundations of cultural consumption views tastes and practices as a better or worse emanation of social class or status. In contrast, this paper shows that cultural consumption is also embedded in a larger system of social networks. Not only does it examine whether having more diversified personal network translates into being involved in a wider range of cultural activities (omnivorousness), it also tests whether holding networks of different strength corresponds with different levels of cultural engagement (strong vs. weak). Based on the survey data collected in Poland in 2017, the analyses yield three main findings. First, cultural consumption continues to reflect social class divisions and is a potential mechanism for social exclusion. Second, network diversity is associated with cultural variety independently of class position. Third, the number of weak ties people hold is more strongly associated with the number of “weak” practices (that is practices of less frequency) and the number of strong ties is positively associated with the number of strong practices (voraciousness). These findings are discussed in terms of balance theory, interactional foci and weak versus strong culture. The implications of the article are that omnivorism both signifies class boundaries and indicates participation in different network structures.     

Analysing networks of networks

We consider data with multiple observations or reports on a network in the case when these networks themselves are connected through some form of network ties. We could take the example of a cognitive social structure where there is another type of tie connecting the actors that provide the reports; or the study of interpersonal spillover effects from one cultural domain to another facilitated by the social ties. Another example is when the individual semantic structures are represented as semantic networks of a group of actors and connected through these actors’ social ties to constitute knowledge of a social group. How to jointly represent the two types of networks is not trivial as the layers and not the nodes of the layers of the reported networks are coupled through a network on the reports. We propose to transform the different multiple networks using line graphs, where actors are affiliated with ties represented as nodes, and represent the totality of the different types of ties as a multilevel network. This affords studying the associations between the social network and the reports as well as the alignment of the reports to a criterion graph. We illustrate how the procedure can be applied to studying the social construction of knowledge in local flood management groups. Here we use multilevel exponential random graph models but the representation also lends itself to stochastic actor-oriented models, multilevel blockmodels, and any model capable of handling multilevel networks.     

Networks containing negative ties

Social network analysts have often collected data on negative relations such as dislike, avoidance, and conflict. Most often, the ties are analyzed in such a way that the fact that they are negative is of no consequence. For example, they have often been used in blockmodeling analyses where many different kinds of ties are used together and all ties are treated the same, regardless of meaning. However, sometimes we may wish to apply other network analysis concepts, such as centrality or cohesive subgroups. The question arises whether all extant techniques are applicable to negative tie data. In this paper, we consider in a systematic way which standard techniques are applicable to negative ties and what changes in interpretation have to be made because of the nature of the ties. We also introduce some new techniques specifically designed for negative ties. Finally we show how one of these techniques for centrality can be extended to networks with both positive and negative ties to give a new centrality measure (PN centrality) that is applicable to directed valued data with both positive and negative ties.     

Goal specific social capital and job satisfaction: Effects of different types of networks on instrumental and social aspects of work

This paper addresses the question “To what extent can job satisfaction be explained as the revenue of social capital?” By conceiving someone’s social network as social capital we specify conditions under which social ties do lead to job satisfaction. We inquire into the idea of goal specificity of social capital, which implies that a network with a given structure and content will have different impacts on various aspects of job satisfaction. If the content of the ties and the structure of the network at the job engender material well-being or produce social approval, satisfaction with the corresponding job aspects increases. Data were collected in 1993 using written questionnaires in two Dutch governmental agencies, one with 32 and the other with 44 employees. These workers’ networks were charted using nine name-generating questions.Social capital, it turns out, is not an all-purpose good but one that is goal specific, even within a single domain of life such as work. Three effects stand out: First, the structure of the network and the content of the ties do matter. Networks of strategic, work-related ties promote an employee’s satisfaction with instrumental aspects of the job, like income, security, and career opportunities. Second, closed networks of identity-based solidarity ties improve an employee’s satisfaction with social aspects of the job, like the general social climate at work and cooperation with management and colleagues. Third, a network with a bow–tie structure (i.e., where a focal actor is the link between two or more mutually exclusive cliques) generally has strong negative effects on satisfaction with the social side of the job; although a bow–tie type network of trusting ties does increase satisfaction with the social side. This implies that Krackhardt’s hypothesis on the unpleasant feelings produced by bow–tie type networks has to be specified for the content of the ties that constitute such a network. The most important conclusion of our analysis is that goal specificity of social capital has implications for both structure and content of social networks. Achievement of a particular goal, such as satisfaction at work, requires not only networks of a certain structure or ties with a particular content, but specifically structured networks of ties with a particular content.     

Avoidance in negative ties: Inhibiting closure,reciprocity, and homophily

Theorising of negative ties has focused on simplex negative tie networks or multiplex signed tie networks. We examine the fundamental differences between positive and negative tie networks measured on the same set of actors. We test six mechanisms of tie formation on face-to-face positive (affect/esteem) and negative (dislike/disesteem) networks of 282 university students. While popularity, activity, and entrainment are present in both networks, closure, reciprocity, and homophily are largely absent from negative tie networks. We argue this arises because avoidance is inherent to negative sentiments. Avoidance reduces information transfer through negative ties and short-circuits cumulative causation.     

Keep around,drop, or revise? exploring what becomes of difficult ties in personal networks

Previous studies increasingly recognize the presence and impact of difficult individuals within personal networks. However, current research sheds little light on the turnover, retention, and change in quality of such difficult ties. The current study addresses this gap by focusing on two distinct forms of network change. We examine how role relationships, support exchange, relational homophily, and personal characteristics are associated with these processes. Data are drawn from three waves of the University of California Social Network Study (UCNets), a project containing comprehensive longitudinal data on ego networks among two adult cohorts. Findings indicate that over time, 34% of difficult ties re-appear in people’s networks as sources of aggravation; 26% of difficult ties are removed from the network; and 40% can no longer be verified as problematic network members. Most ties no longer deemed difficult are identified as providing one or more supportive functions. Multinomial multilevel models reveal that exchanging support tends to anchor difficult ties in the network. Kinship, meanwhile, plays a large role in whether difficult ties remain or get dropped. Personal characteristics such as gender, income, and relocation also play a role in these processes. Overall, we conclude that the turnover dynamics of difficult ties are similar to other ties, and the apparent change from negative to positive suggests that many ties hold ambivalent properties that make shedding such ties less common than may be expected.     

The increasing importance of friends: Changes in core discussion network composition in post-communist Hungary between 1997 – 2015

In order to detect changes in social connectivity, we examined evolutions in the personal network structure by analyzing over-time trends in the composition of the population’s core discussion networks on four cross-sectional, nationally representative surveys between 1997 and 2015, in the era of post-communism, in Hungary. There has been a very significant change; in fact, a reversal of trends regarding the composition of the core discussion networks (CDNs) concerning kin and non-kin ties over the past decades. Our data suggest that friendship ties gained more importance. There seems to be a generation-specific aspect of the change: young people include family ties less often than older people and this effect strengthens over time. Women still have a higher ratio of kin ties compared to men and this effect does not change significantly during the analyzed period.     

Psychological predispositions and network structure: The relationship between individual predispositions,structural holes and network closure

We examine the effect of individual psychological differences on network structures, proposing several hypotheses about how individual differences might predispose actors to structure their social environment by seeking network closure or by sustaining structural holes. We introduce a new triad census method to examine personal networks of strong and weak ties. For 125 egocentric networks we correlated the triad census results with several extensively researched psychological instruments. The triad census reduced to three principal components, describing central aspects of strength-of-weak-ties and structural holes theories. Psychological predispositions explained a significant proportion of the variance in each of these components. Our results suggest that people who see themselves vulnerable to external forces tend to inhabit closed networks of weak connections. On the other hand, people who seek to keep their strong tie partners apart, and thereby bridge structural holes, tend to be individualists, to believe that they control the events in their lives, and to have higher levels of neuroticism. Finally, people with strong network closure and “weak” structural holes (as with the “strength of weak ties”) tend to categorize themselves and others in terms of group memberships. They also tend to be more extraverted and less individualistic.     

Prismatic effects of negative ties

Research on negative ties has focused primarily on the harm they do. In this paper, we show that negative ties can also have beneficial effects. We argue that, like positive ties, negative ties can link actors together in the minds of observers. As a result, we theorize that negative ties with high-status actors can benefit a focal actor, whereas negative ties with low-status actors can harm the focal actor. This prismatic effect depends on the existing status of the focal actor: a focal actor of low status is likely to benefit far more from negative ties with high-status actors and suffer more from negative ties with low-status actors than will an actor of high-status. To test our ideas, we analyze the phenomenon of "diss songs" in hip-hop music. A diss song is a song in which a rapper makes derogatory comments about another rapper, constituting a negative tie. We analyze the effects of negative ties among 53 rappers over 20 points in time on audience reaction as measured by record sales. We find that negative ties with high-status actors enhance future sales for low-status actors. However, negative ties with lower-status actors have no effect on the future sales of both low- and high-status actors. Just as some researchers have reported both positive and negative consequences of social capital, our study demonstrates that negative ties can also have both positive and negative outcomes.     

‘We've Also Become Quite Good Friends’: Environmentalists,Social Networks and Social Comparison in British Columbia,Canada

Social networks influence social movement recruitment and individuals' ongoing participation in social movement organizations. In this article, we use a qualitative approach to explore the meaning of social networks for environmental movement participants in British Columbia, Canada. Our analysis draws on interviews with 33 core members of the movement. Environmental group participation creates multiplex social networks, encompassing work, leisure and friendship. Social movement networks are conduits for information exchange among environmental groups and they amplify the political power of individual participants. Ties to government workers and forest company management are more intense – based on frequency of contact – than ties to forestry labour or First Nations groups. However, forestry workers and First Nations are viewed more positively than government or forest company management. This illustrates how the intensity of social network ties can be distinguished from the subjective meanings attached to them by network participants.     

Echo chambers and social mediators in public advocacy issue networks

The growing trend of politically motivated consumer boycotts and buycotts on social media not only impacts a company’s financial bottom line, but more fundamentally disrupts relationships between the firm and its publics, the cornerstone of public relations (Ferguson, 1984; Sommerfeldt, & Kent, 2015). On a broader level, such politically motivated advocacy is a critical facet of civil society with important implications on the societal role of public relations (Taylor, 2010). In light of the significance of politically motivated consumer advocacy to public relations, a multi-phase, exploratory study was conducted. Study 1 applies content analysis and social network analysis to examine how different interactive mechanisms on social media—retweet, mention, and reply—may affect communication within and between communities of different ideological views surrounding the boycott and buycott issues. Study 2 further explores the challenges and opportunities of fostering exchange of diverse viewpoints by identifying new social mediators—the “echoers” who propel information flow among in-group members, and the “bridgers” who initiate communication with political out-group members—and assess the key network characteristics of these social mediators. The findings of these two studies advance public relations theories on networks, intergroup communication, and civil society by illustrating how social media structure and social mediators shape the networked public discourse to facilitate or inhibit conversations between publics of different ideological orientations.     

Mobilising social network support for childcare: The case of Polish migrant mothers in Dublin

This paper describes the utilisation of support networks for the organisation of informal childcare by working Polish migrant mothers in Dublin. Grounded in a support network perspective the study employs a mixed method approach to elucidate how the mothers use local and transnational relations in their child-minding strategies, but also highlights the obstacles posed by the distant character of the latter ties. In line with previous research on support networks, we find a strong reliance on strong ties in providing instrumental and emotional support (e.g., Wellman and Wortley, 1990) but also that ‘distance’ matters (e.g., Mok et al., 2010) and shapes the network mobilisation strategies of the working mothers. Locally based weak ties, based on various forms of reciprocity, are supplemental in providing ad-hoc crisis support when transnational ties cannot be mobilized. Nonetheless, transnational ties are shown to be crucial in the childcare provision, in particular for longer spells of regular childcare.     

Who’s missing out? The impact of digital networking behavior & social identity on PR job search outcomes

This study investigates how different aspects of social identity correlated with online networking and job search success. Undergraduates and recent graduates seeking public relations roles between 2020 and 2021 were surveyed (N = 355) for their early career job-seeking practices. The pre-existing lack of diversity in PR and the tendency to favor job candidates who are similar to the decision-maker means that the move to virtual relationship building and vetting may be especially impactful for diverse applicants. The results showed that networking was extremely important as over 94% of respondents found their position via networking of some sort. Respondents found roles most commonly via LinkedIn (57.5%), followed by other social media (49.9%). LinkedIn network size was positively correlated with more job offers, whereas Twitter and Facebook network sizes were insignificant. Those who identified as white used LinkedIn more and had more job offers than those who identified as BIPOC. Veterans and those receiving need-based assistance also reported having fewer job offers. This paper extends the strength of weak ties theory by demonstrating the importance of weak ties in digital networking in the PR industry. This research suggests that maintaining weak ties via LinkedIn is valuable for success in digital networking, particularly by growing a robust LinkedIn network and maintaining an active profile. Practical advice for PR educators and students illustrates how to enhance LinkedIn use to promote equity in digital networking. Moreover, the PR field may promote diversity among applicants and hires through mentoring, recruiting, and growing their own diverse digital network.