Malcolm Gladwell has written an interesting piece in the New Yorker, arguing that real social change occurs when strong, rather than weak-tie networks, organize hierarchically, rather than in a de-centralized network structure. His example contrasts the lunch-counter protests in Greensboro, North Carolina in the sixties with the low-stakes activism through social media. While he makes many valid points, his key argument is misguided.

I will make two main points in this post. One, the key issue facing activists who wish for real social change is the mismatch between the scale of our problems (global) and the natural scale of our sociality (local). This is a profound problem and more, not less, social media is almost certainly a key element of any solution. Second, the relationship between weak and strong ties is one of complementarity and support, not one of opposition. Gladwell has written about weak and strong ties before and continues a tradition of contrasting them as ontological opposites, somehow opposing and displacing each other. That is a widespread conceptual error and rests upon an inadequate understanding of these concepts. Large pools of weaker ties are crucial to being able to build robust networks of stronger ties – and Internet use is a key to this process.

Scale of Our Problems (Global) versus the Scale of our Sociality (Local) and Social Movements

The main problems facing humanity today are climate change, resource depletion, economic devastation, environmental destruction and for those unfortunate to be living in particular regions of the world, war, epidemics, and dire poverty. (Most of the last group is composed of people with very few resources and no influence, and at the mercy of larger powers, so let me join the world in callously and shamefully ignoring their plight for the moment).

But all the main problems in the first group are global in scale and just cannot be affected at the local level. Arguing about how to organize lunch-counter sit-ins reminds me of the generals fighting the last war. Want to change the environmental laws in your city council so your town recycles better? Knock yourself out (I’m all for it) but that will hardly make a dent with the global climate trainwreck that is fast headed our way. Want to force corporations in your state to make sure their employees aren’t so poor that they are on Medicaid and foodstamps, i.e. effectively subsidized by the regular taxpayers? Sure, and make sure to smile when you wave bye-bye to them as they leave for a more favorable state or country. The race-to-the-bottom structure that has been enacted through decades of neoliberal policies has effectively freed the powerful from constraints at the local level. The problem isn’t we can’t organize lunch-counter sit-ins or high-risk actions; the problem is they don’t matter much. Our sociality tends to be local the scale of the action required to confront today’s problems is global.

To effectively deal with the issue of climate change as a real solution requires equity and enforcement at the global scale – billions of people, hundreds of nations. (Thus, this is a multi-level problem). Currently, there is no organization with reach, power or jurisdiction to effectively address this issue. The only globally-organized actors are large and powerful interests — corporations and nation-states. To make these powerful actors behave in a sustainable manner would require gutting all their alternatives and completely encircling them so that they cannot escape from citizen mandates.

No, we need to be able to tell them, you cannot pollute in China, or pay your workers a pittance in Indonesia, or leave them without health insurance in the United States, or move your factories, and your monies, and your capital, and your infrastructure at will, from one end of the globe to the other, as if the trail of misery and destruction you leave behind is of no consequence. We need to make it consequential for them everywhere, all the time, simultaneously.

Lunch-counter sit-ins in a few places? Even at the national scale? Maybe we’ll make a few powerful executives smile with bemusement. What we need is simultaneous action for citizen-powered mandates on state and corporate conduct. That should wipe a few grins off smug faces. Does anyone imagine we can organize something on that global scale without the Internet? Let me know.

Now, I agree with Gladwell on many of his points about inflating the importance of Twitter, say, in Iran, and Morozov is absolutely correct that this cuts both ways: increased technology also brings increased surveillance capacity. And I hate the example in Clay Shirky’s book about the Wall Street employee who leverages his social network to hunt down a teenager who stole a friend’s stupid expensive stupid shiny stupid new phone (even though he was in the right, the idea of people so powerful spending so much time and effort –-and mobilizing tens of thousands of people at some point– to make the police chase down a misguided teenager and arrest her for such a petty crime makes my skin crawl).

That said, Shirky is absolutely right in both of his latest books. The Internet is the key to our collective action problem -– it’s the only tool that lowers the barriers for vast numbers of ordinary people to coordinate, motivate and engage in consequential action. If, one day, we manage to organize the equivalent of lunch-counter sit-ins simultaneously in one hundred countries, you know it will be organized online. You might go with your close friends, or you might go with strangers and find yourself having become close friends.

Weak versus Strong Ties

Which brings me to the fact that strong versus weak ties should not be seen as opposites but rather as supporting and complementary dynamics. One key point is that Internet bolsters strong ties directly and indirectly. Directly, because Internet allows for more frequent, trivial “ambient” communication and that is the bedrock of strong-tie formation. All those tweets about what you had for breakfast that everyone makes fun of? A lot of research shows that if you record ordinary people’s conversations with their close friends and family and you will find that this is exactly what they do – talk about the mundane rhythms of life. Current structures of suburbia, distant homes, moving for jobs, smaller families, etc. all make it harder to engage in that kind of daily interaction – and weaken our communities. The Internet is the opposite of these processes: suburbs took us away from other people and locked us into houses; the Internet opens a door from the house into potentially shared places.

The concept of weak versus strong ties that Gladwell uses often originates from a seminal paper Mark Granovetter, “Strength of Weak Ties.” (I’m going to go technical briefly here.) In this wonderful study, Granovetter isn’t interested in tie-strength per se but at a particular network structure called “bridge ties” — a connection between two internally dense networks that would otherwise be unconnected save for that bridging tie. Presumably because complete data about the structure of people’s social networks was very difficult to obtain, Granovetter suggested using weak ties as a proxy for bridges.

In this conceptualization, the benefit of weak ties is not that they were weak per se, but rather that the tie network of a weak tie is presumed to be less likely to overlap with one’s own tie network and thus more likely to have access to differential resources and information. There are two further assumptions to make this work: strong ties are likely to already know each other (and thus be part of a densely connected network) and strong-tie alters are also more likely to be similar to ego in terms of resources and attributes due to homophily, similarity of origin, or convergent evolution. (I’ll perhaps blog later; both of these assumptions, technically called “open triads” and homophily of strong-ties is likely much weaker in today’s world).

It’s important to note that whether or not a tie is a bridge is dichotomous. Tie-strength, on the other hand, is continuous (and dynamic as ties vary over time in strength). Granovetter, and many others after him, have divided ties into weak and strong by artificially drawing lines. However, the key contrast was, and remains, between bridge and non-bridge ties; conflating them as weak and strong ties and then contrasting them as if they were direct opposites is conceptually incorrect. In reality, people’s ties range from very strong to very weak. Strong-ties become weak over time and vice-versa. Weak ties and strong ties are not ontological opposites.

Internet as a Key Resource for Tie-Formation

Which brings me to my final point; Given the decline of importance of place and family in providing people with strong ties (one’s very close ties used to be immediate family, kin, neighbors, etc), where do you think people will turn to if they are to regenerate robust communities composed of strongly-connected individuals? Their weaker ties. All those Facebook friends that Gladwell and others take turns making fun of? That is exactly where most people can potentially draw stronger ties. Tweets/discussions about lunch and naps and status updates about dates and breakups? Bedrock of sociality and of social networks of stronger and weaker ties. Do we really think that strong communities spend their time discussing the finer points of flexible specialization in the labor process under post-Fordism? Research shows that adding online connectivity to an otherwise face-to-face space like a neighborhood increases the general level of bonding because it increases the channels of communication (See work by Keith Hampton, Barry Wellman or Gustavo Mesch, among others). (Think of a neighborhood mailing list – it lets neighbors connect even though they may hardly have time to get together regularly given long-commutes and other responsibilities – Internet allows asynchronous, rich communication freed from requirements of coordinating time and place).

Consequently, pools of weaker ties, organized around shared affinities and interests, will likely become most people’s source for closer friendships. As we introduce people in our increasingly geographically-dispersed networks to each other, we can recreate the denser, closely-knit communities of mutual-interdependence that do indeed give rise to social movement. Internet and social media will clearly be a key in this process because going back to place-based ties is not only not possible, and more importantly, inadequate, for rising up to meet the global, multi-level, complex problems we as all of humanity face today.

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity that is bigger and more powerful than a handful of corporations and the corrupt, self-perpetuating class of politicians.

So, maybe seeing a tweet about what an war orphan in Afghanistan had for breakfast (nothing), what a worker in a sweatshop in China had for lunch (nothing because there is no lunch break), or where a survivor of one of the increasing numbers of large-scale climate events like massive floods is sleeping tonight (on a wet piece of plastic) interspersed into our daily rhythms of communication with our local friends and communities is exactly what we need to organize us into the “hive mind” that everyone is so afraid of when in reality, what is destroying our opportunities for individuality and creativity, subverting us from realizing our human potential is not that we are tweeting about trivialities, but that the governance of our planet has been taken away from us.

I say, bring on the hive mind, please let it be global in scale as nothing less will do, and let Facebook and Twitter lead the way.

I am going to be speaking at the following event in NYC at the Austrian Cultural Forum (11 E. 52nd St.):

Panel: 1984 Today, Tomorrow. Surveillance, Privacy and Human Rights, seen from Media and Social Sciences perspectives

My co-panelists are: Michael Freund, senior research professor at Webster University Vienna and editor and writer for the austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, Steve Lohr, author as well as reporter for the New York Times,and Matthias Karmasin, professor and chair for media and communications at the University of Klagenfurt.

I am very much looking forward to this event! New York is one of my favorite cities in the world (after Istanbul) and the topic of the panel is really close to my heart and my research!

There is a growing debate about whether people should leave Facebook and whether there should be government regulation. I’d like to argue that it is very difficult for most people to leave Facebook three reasons: network externalities, social norms and technical competence. Network externalities, which I discuss below, means that the first to become a standard has an enormous advantage that can make it very hard for competitors. Plus, I believe that users of sites such as Facebook, Google, and even Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist and Wikipedia (a non-profit), have solid  reasons they can make moral, legal and perhaps even regulatory claims on these companies. Such companies exist by the virtue of the work their users have put in without monetary compensation. Also, they deal with often intimate personal information that deserves protection irrespective of claims about ownership.

Network externalities is economist-speak for the tendency of the value of certain types of products or services to increase as more people use them. The more people own fax machines, for example, the more useful each one becomes. That is also why there is a single standard for fax machines — would you switch to a brand new, faster fax machine standard if there was nobody else you could fax with your machine? Research shows that the presence of network externalities trumps product preference or quality; many people will chose a service that has more users compared to the one that is otherwise better for them. Such platforms, such as Facebook, tend to quickly dominate their market and become near-monopolies. This is also why everyone lists their wares on Ebay, where all the buyers are, and advertises on Google, where all the eyeballs go. The fact that a lot of people already have Facebook accounts means that considerations of network externalities will result in existing people staying put, or new people joining in anyway, even if they have qualms about the privacy issues.

People understand this. In my research, I asked many young adults why they are on Facebook if it causes so much trouble. “Because everyone else is.” Many people have laboriously constructed networks of far-flung friends, family, school-mates and colleagues and can count on others to find them on Facebook.

Facebook is a social norm in many settings, especially among young adults and increasingly among other groups. On a typical college campus not having a Facebook profile is tantamount to going around with a bag over your face; it can be done, but at significant social cost.

Also, while the tech-elite don’t have any problems up-and-moving to a new social network or tool, for many people, there are steep investment costs to mastering one more application. I don’t think that most people in the chattering classes who tend to be tech-savvy understand how little competence most people have in navigating their computer or the web. I am not blaming them; it is not a user-friendly environment. It takes time, effort and familiarity and most people don’t have either. This contributes to the issue of network externalities. Plus, I think most people are not aware of the implications of the privacy settings and how visible their information may be. And, really, why should they? For most people, the  privacy settings are not that relevant (or easy to understand) until something goes wrong — and then it is too late.

Network externalities mean that whoever becomes established first has a huge advantage, as a critical mass of users pull in others in a positive-feedback loop. Early users often choose sites that offer a solid product and reasonable terms, and so the initial “terms-of-service acts” as an implicit social contract. It is this social contract that is being broken, and that is not okay.

Initially, Facebook had a reasonable, and transparent, privacy policy. But the frequent unilateral changes have forced a great deal of information to be visible and created tedious and difficult-to-use privacy controls. This bait-and-switch tactic is one reason many are so upset.

Exposure online has real costs; more than half the subjects in my research on online sociality report negative consequences, including job loss and stalking, from social-network profile information finding its way to unintended audiences. And that is the tip of the iceberg as my respondents were reporting only on what they knew. Some describe spending an hour a day to make sure that nothing untoward –an unwelcome photo, an explicit comment on a wall — is seen by the wrong pair of eyes.

In a nutshell, Facebook is the new social commons, at least as important for fostering social interaction as the office water-cooler or the neighborhood park. This controversy reminds us that we must deal as a society with the fact that our commons has moved online and into privately-owned domains.

It is time to stop telling people “don’t share anything online if you don’t want the world to see it” or dismiss all concerns by reminding people that having an account is voluntary, as Facebook recently did. That simply won’t do as it is unfair, unrealistic and misses the larger point about human sociality. Sociality is a core human need not easily abandoned. Being able to socialize is both a need and a right. And the larger point is that increasingly, we socialize online.

People do want to share information online, but not necessarily with the whole world but with their own chosen audiences of friends, family, and acquaintances. Given that ample research shows the importance of robust social networks to health, well-being, longevity, economic achievement, civic life and a healthy democracy, it is time to stop treating the infrastructure of sociality as a mere commodity controlled by the whims, and profit motives, of large corporations.

Users of sites like Facebook (Google and YouTube are other examples) provide valuable infrastructure that captures and monetizes work its users put in, be it in terms of rich social data or search keywords or auction items or video production. Users of these sites are “prosumers,” who produce as well as consume; as co-creators of these sites, they have a strong moral claim to treatment with respect and to a role in determining the rules by which they operate.

Finally, ownership does not provide a blank check to freely do what one wants with personal and often quite intimate information. The European Union already has regulation, and other countries may follow suit. In other spheres, U.S. law also recognizes that dignity trumps property rights; in most states, tenants in rented dwellings have a right to privacy which landlords are not allowed to violate at will. Why can’t we have such rights in our online dwellings?

For now, Facebook should follow the lead of Google and roll back all its changes, offering them as options to be chosen freely. But even if companies do the right thing, it’s past time for a broader social discussion about our rights in the new digital commons.

Do people have any grounds to complain about the latest changes to the rules of publicness of various elements of a Facebook profile? Or is the only legitimate response “love-it or leave-it?”

Lately, Facebook has been pushing a dual strategy of “public-or-nothing” with some profile elements and “public-by-default and good-luck-figuring-out-the-settings” with others.  Some influential industry analysts and Facebook’s own publicity officer have taken a “nobody is twisting your arm to use Facebook; leave if you don’t like it” approach.

The correct analogy to the current situation would be if tenants had no rights to privacy in their homes because they happen to be renting the walls and doors. This week, you are allowed to close the door but, oops, we changed the terms-of-service.

At face value, it seems like a fair point. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Facebook or any other online social network service. At most, it seems, we have a right to complain about obscure terms-of-service and demand for better language and better heads-up of changes. At most, the strongest demand that is seen as legitimate seems to be that we should be allowed to opt-in.

I argue that this is too limited a view. We have to stop looking at the “Facebook – lone individual” transaction and look at what’s going on at the systemic level. This isn’t just about Facebook, either. This is about the fact that increasing portions of our sociality are now conducted in privately-owned spaces. The implications of this are still playing out.

The latest developments appear to be the next stage to the historical trend of privatization of our publics. Examples of those include the dominance of corporate-owned media over the civic public sphere, outsourcing of many government functions to less-accountable contractors including some aspects of war, increasing reduction of our public spaces to malls and privately-owned town-squares, such as downtown Silver Spring, MD where first-amendment does not apply, etc.

What is currently happening is the privatization of our privates, not just our publics. And this is not a mere question of legality but a lack of legal protections being carried over to a new medium. In some sense, this parallels the lack of carrying of wiretap protections on the phone to the Internet – the social relations did not change but the medium changed allowing for a gap in legal protections.

The correct analogy to the current situation would be if tenants had no rights to privacy in their homes because they happen to be renting the walls and doors. This week, you are allowed to close the door but, oops, we changed the terms-of-service. No more closed doors! You had locks last week but we don’t allow them as of this week. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Further, it is as if all the housing in the major city with the jobs was owned by a single company so the choice was either leave that town or surrender control over your private life. “Don’t like it, leave!” the bosses of the company town (and other people in positions of privilege would say.) And shake their heads over the inability of people to read the terms-of-service on their ever-changing lease. The value of Facebook is that people have created their networks through its infrastructure, and they have done so with the understanding that the network would be under their control because that is what Facebook said initially. Instead, all of a sudden, they’ve found themselves in a company town. This cannot be a viable strategy, ethically or commercially.

There is a reason the law recognizes the right of the tenant to privacy within her home regardless of ownership. People are not businesses, sociality is not a mere transaction, and our social interactions are more than opportunities for monetization.

There are four key points to the infrastructure of sociality:

1- Being social is not optional. It is a core human need and a requirement for being a part of society. It is legitimate to argue that the infrastructure of sociality cannot be just about priorities of businesses and intricacies of ownership.

2- Every society has “commons” – shared infrastructure that makes it possible for the society as a whole to function. Internet is now a part of that commons in general and many social applications such as Facebook are part of the “social commons.” That is why Facebook, the corporation, is so valuable and people who own it are very rich. It would not be wise of them to ignore that fact.

3- These commons function to the degree that they do because they are shared. You cannot merely withdraw because the value is in the network. Thus, claims of ownership of the network cause tension because of the dual-nature of this network: it is created by the people and consists of the people while the infrastructure is privately controlled. Currently, the infrastructure-owners want to claim primary control. That is the tension we are witnessing.

4- The “transaction between parties” approach is not illuminating because first, the transaction is not between equals. Power has to enter into this analysis. Further, people do have a claim to the network because they created it. Facebook wants all the control because it owns the infrastructure.

Historically, the private sphere tended to be intimate/hidden/personal while the public sphere was civic/visible/impersonal. The internet has shuffled those distinctions quite radically in ways that are too long to explore in one already-too-long blog post. Our cultural toolkit, the ways we know how to act, regulate, maintain and explore those boundaries, has not caught up to the new reality. Sociologists talk about primary (intimate, core, face-to-face) and secondary (larger groups) social relations. While the second may involve a larger audience, they are both still delimited. Facebook is forcing elements of that sociality to be effectively globally-public.

As a society, we understand that ownership of infrastructure does not constitute a blank check to publicize and monetize private interactions. We should carry over that principle to new technologies because what matters is our social contract, not whether the interaction now takes place over silicon and wire instead of through sound and air.

Should shopping malls have the right to surreptitiously record every word you say to the person you are with and sell it to whomever? Do they have a right to put cameras in the lavatories? Do tenants have a right to privacy? If I am on a bus, or a train, or business, or anywhere that I do not own, have I forfeited all rights and expectations of control over my words and interactions? Indeed, law recognizes that the fundamental dignity of the person means that we do not just surrender those rights in privately-owned spaces. Facebook should recognize and honor those principles.

Can Facebook still make money? Sure. I believe there are many ways that Facebook could monetize the work that its 400 millions have put into its system without trampling over the basic social contract.

Ultimately, I think they are the biggest threat to themselves because affordances of the Internet do mean that people could self-organize and take the network elsewhere with a lot more ease than Facebook seems to think. I suspect Facebook is betting that people have too much invested in their profiles. It may well be true at the moment but Facebook would be wise, commercially and ethically, to keep in mind the ease with which cascades can self-organize in networks.

My co-author Nathan Jurgenson and I submitted a paper to First Monday assessing the potential impact of the iPad. We co-wrote this article after being similarly  startled by the turn to the old ways of consumption that the iPad seemed to represent. (We had both independently blogged about this days after the original the launch in January). I’ve noticed that other commentators have made similar points and there seems to be a growing debate about what this means for the future of the Internet.

I’m posting our abstract below*. If you would like a copy of the full paper, drop me a line at zeynep at umbc.edu.

The iPad: The “Jesus Tablet” and the Resurrection of Consumer Society

Apple’s much-discussed iPad fits squarely within the logic of consumer society and is directly opposed to the logic of the participatory Web, or Web 2.0, and the logic of prosumption, whereby users produce that which they consume. Instead of prosumer society’s focus on active participation, diminishing corporate control and a trend towards free products and services, the iPad channels passive consumption, corporate control via “closed” systems and a renewed focus on traditional, top-down “paid” media. The iPad is engineered to enforce this passivity, for example through lack of a tactile keyboard, and facilitates it most fundamentally by way of spectacle, in the sense of theorists of consumer society like Baudrillard, DeBord and Ritzer.  The iPad is indicative of Apple’s Disneyfied approach which attempts to create a “walled garden” that seeks to enchant while monetizing more and more of the interactions within the system.

*  Since First Monday is single-blind this does not violate peer review.

My paper on who makes new friends through social media got accepted to the 4th  International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. The full paper, Who Acquires Friends Through Social Media and Why? “Rich Get Richer” versus “Seek and Ye Shall Find,” can be found here.

In this study, I examined whether acquiring new friends through online interaction fit a “Rich get Richer” or a “Social Compensation” model. In other words, are the naturally gregarious making new friends online, or does the Internet allow the introverted catch-up? According to my data, neither seems to be the case. The odds of making new friends online is not related to being in either group.  On the other hand, the population in my study was almost evenly divided between those who absolutely must look someone in the eye, directly, before they can feel a connection and those who feel the opportunity to communicate without the burdens of appearance to be liberating and more conducive to bonding. It was people with that latter disposition who were more likely to make new friends online, and whether one was in this group was simply not related to number of friends in the offline world.  Thus, “Seek and Ye Shall Find.” As I said in my abstract:

This study contradicts the idea that people who are more social offline are more social online, as well as the notion that it is only the social misfits who use social media to make new friends as there was no difference in the number of offline friends between those who made new friends online and those who did not.

The quality of social interaction over the Internet seems always to give rise to heated debate. It’s clear that a lot of people find mediated communication to be lacking. On the other hand, the way we live now necessitates that a good portion of our sociality is not conducted face-to-face. Obviously, This is not a 21st century phenomenon either. It starts with the earliest separation of the message from the messenger: writing. Plato famously lamented the invention of the  writing as complained that  “once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it.”  He found written material to be  a “ghost” of the original, devoid of the “genuine knowledge in the soul of the learner.”  Indeed, you cannot look a sentence in the eye. Or, can we? We have millennia of passionate, soulful, brilliant writing that evokes awe and deep feelings among generation after generation of readers.

This study contradicts the idea that people who are more social offline are more social online, as well as the notion that it is only the social misfits who use social media to make new friends as there was no difference in the number of offline friends between those who made new friends online and those who did not.

With those questions in mind, I conducted a survey which asked 817 students whether they thought one could become friends with someone they met online, and also whether they themselves had made a friend that way. I also asked  about their offline sociality — how many friends they regularly spent time with.  I asked them, qualitatively, to expand upon their answers because I wanted to go beyond the yes/no dichotomy.

The results were quite surprising. First about half the population thinks it is possible to make online friends, while the other half strongly disagrees. This was a rolling sample lasting a little more than a year and the proportion was remarkably stable from semester to semester, suggesting a stable trait. And making friends online was not correlated with offline sociality, i.e. how many friends a person had in the physical world. Unsurprisingly, amount of time on the Internet in general did not matter, but amount of time on social networking sites did.  With the exception of race, which I will talk about in a moment, what mattered most was whether people believed in the possibility of such friendships. And best I can tell, this wasn’t just a post-hoc effect either, i.e. people who found such friendships then developing this belief as only 10 percent of the “believers” indicated having witnessed such friendships as the reason for their conviction. Analysis of the reasons why people felt the way they did revealed some fascinating results. Potential for deceit and lack of face-to-face communication was the main turn-off for the “doubters.” That much is unsurprising.  However, I found the reasons brought up by the “believers” in online friendship to be very interesting. They mostly emphasized that lack of face-to-face communication made for better, deeper connections. This harkens back to a theory developed by Joe Walther called hyperpersonal communication. Basically, Walther argued that the lack of visual cues and immediate co-presence can be a plus for developing intimacy. We are not distracted by appearances, we can give the benefit of the doubt to the other person, we can reflect and be more thoughtful in our self-presentation, and we thus can find ourselves in a virtuous cycle where we can bond more easily with the other person. As I said in my paper:

Those who emphasized the “hyperpersonal” characteristics of online sociality did not appear to view them as either inferior or as substitutes for lack of offline skills, but rather as a form of communication that spotlighted a different kind of interaction, one based on conversation and sharing of thoughts rather than being judged on physical appearances. Although many online interactions include awareness of physical appearance through pictures, it seems that the word can be more important when physical copresence is not an option. The prevalence of responses indicating the “hyperpersonal” nature of cyberspace as an affordance of close friendship suggests that this factor has not faded from importance even though the Internet has changed greatly since it was first proposed by Walther (1996). The results indicate that that some young people are still looking for refuge from the demands of physical appearance and are seeking to make deep connections through conversations. On the other hand, there is a group of people who absolutely cannot imagine intimacy or close social interactions unless they are regularly in the corporeal copresence of the other person.

Well, plus ça change… The Internet has changed dramatically since Walther’s original 1996 paper, but it seems that for some, mediated sociality retains its character of being a refuge from demands of appearance and remains a place for more thoughtful, considered interaction. So, rather than a rich get richer or social compensation, it seems that making friends online is just … different.

Finally, the only other variable that jumped out in my analyses was whether the respondent was an African-American. All else equal, Black students were a lot more likely acquire new online friends compared to their White counterparts.  (I ran logistic regressions so I am controlling for variables such as age, gender, time spent online, time spent on social networking sites, years they have been on the Internet, number of offline friends — this is an all-else-equals model). Since I don’t know the character of these new friends, I can’t really be sure what’s going on but it is certainly intriguing.  Are Black people more likely to use new media to connect with other Black people they otherwise don’t know? Given the continuing dominance of spatial segregation in the United States, could this be a way to diversify one’s network? I can’t tell from just this data.

I will present my paper at the 4th ICWSM conference on May 24th. I am definitely looking forward to talking about all these issues and get feedback and ideas from my co-panelists and the audience.