Jeffrey Boase

The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships: Personal Relationships: On and Off the Internet

That the internet is a communication medium for personal relationships is obvious. That the nature of the internet affects the nature of personal relationships has often been proclaimed – recall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” – but less often proven, especially in field studies. How might the internet have an impact? Although the internet has captured popular attention as a communication and information medium, a substantial body of research has only developed recently. This chapter discusses the role of the internet in personal relationships. It starts with a brief description of the socially relevant characteristics of internet technology and a summary of the debate between utopian and dystopian accounts of internet use on personal relationships. Both of these accounts are inadequate because they take a technologically deterministic approach that ignores the causal role of the individual’s need to maintain offline social relationships. Research that examines the internet’s role in facilitating communication between family and friends, forming new social ties and neighboring relations shows that the internet is neither destroying nor radically altering society for the better. Rather, research results point to the need for a more holistic account of internet use that places internet use in the broader context of all personal relationships. They suggest that the interpersonal patterns associated with internet use are the continuations of a shift in the nature of personal networks that began well before the advent of the internet. This shift toward “networked individualism” involves the transition from spatially proximate and densely-knit communities in which people belong to more spatially dispersed and sparsely-knit personal networks in which people maneuver.

Measuring mobile phone use: Self‐report versus log data.

Approximately 40% of mobile phone use studies published in scholarly communication journals base their findings on self-report data about how frequently respondents use their mobile phones. Using a subset of a larger representative sample we examine the validity of this type of self-report data by comparing it to server log data. The self-report data correlate only moderately with the server log data, indicating low criterion validity. The categorical self-report measure asking respondents to estimate “how often” they use their mobile phones fared better than the continuous self-report measure asking them to estimate their mobile phone activity “yesterday.” A multivariate exploratory analysis further suggests that it may be difficult to identify under- and overreporting using demographic variables alone.

Connected Lives: The Project1

Barring the odd beast and monk, just about everyone is connected these days - at most by 6 degrees of interpersonal connection and often by less (Milgram, 1967; Kochen, 1989; Watts, 2003). Yet only a tiny fraction of those who are connected ever interact in any meaningful way as friends, relatives, neighbours, workmates, and acquaintances. These ties comprise our individual personal communities, each a solar system of 10-2000 persons orbiting around us (Wellman, 1979).

PERSONAL NETWORKS AND THE PERSONAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

In contrast to technologically deterministic approaches that focus on how communication technology affects social relationships, this paper examines how individuals draw on a variety of commonly used communication media in conjunction with in-person contact to stay connected to their personal networks. I term this use of multiple communication media the ‘personal communication system’. Findings are based on a random sample telephone survey of 2200 adults living throughout the continental USA. Descriptive statistics show that despite the popularity of email and mobile phones, in-person and landline phone contact are still the most common ways of connecting with personal networks. Multivariate analysis reveals a more complex picture of media use, showing that the extent to which each medium is used varies to differing degrees with the size and diversity of personal networks. Hierarchical cluster analysis is used to explore the possibility that individuals may have different types of personal communication systems. Results show only two distinct clusters: those who draw heavily on all types of media to connect with their personal networks and those who draw less heavily on all types of media. Heavy communicators typically have larger and more diverse personal networks than light communicators. When taken together, the results presented in this paper suggest that rather than radically altering relationships, communication technology is embedded in social networks as part of a larger communication system that individuals use to stay socially connected.

No Such Effect? The Implications of Measurement Error in Self-Report Measures of Mobile Communication Use

Research on the social and psychological effects of mobile phone communication primarily is conducted using self-report measures of use. However, recent studies have suggested such measures of mobile phone communication use contain a significant amount of measurement error. This study compares the frequency of mobile phone use measured by self-report questions with error-free log data automatically collected through an Android smartphone application. Using data from 310 Android phone users in Japan, we investigate the extent to which nonrandom measurement error exists in self-report responses to questions about mobile phone use and predictors of this error. Our analysis shows that users generally overreport their frequency of mobile communication and that overestimation is better predicted by proxy measures of social activity than demographic variables. We further show an example of how overreporting can result in an overestimation of the effects of mediated communication on civic engagement. Finally, the value of behavioral log data in mediated communication research is discussed.

Kei-Tying teens: Using mobile phone e-mail to bond, bridge, and break with social ties-a study of Japanese adolescents

This paper examines the extent to which Japanese adolescents use mobile phone e-mail to bond, bridge, and break with their social ties. Although existing literature shows that adolescents use mobile phone e-mail to bond with intimate strong ties, the fluid nature of social networks during adolescence suggests that mobile phone e-mail may also be used to bridge to new ties and to break with old ties. Drawing on a stratified random sample survey of 501 high school students living in Tokyo, we find that mobile phone e-mail is used both to bond and bridge, but not to break with ties. We also find that the intensity with which Japanese adolescents use mobile phone e-mail is more fundamentally a result of bridging than bonding. These findings apply both to typical users and heavy users.

Multiple Discussion Networks and Their Consequence for Political Participation

Social capital studies have provided some evidence that discussion networks increase political participation. However, a counterargument is that discussion with heterogeneous networks may instead decrease political participation. We examine the empirical validity of this claim using multiple discussion network data collected through the 2003 Japanese General Social Survey. We find that talking about politics positively affects political participation, irrespective of whether politics is the main subject of conversation or merely a by-product of conversation about other topics. Further, our results do not support the somewhat controversial claim that interacting with others holding opposing political views decreases political participation. To the contrary, we find a positive link between political heterogeneity and political participation in a variety of discussion networks.

The consequences of personal networks for Internet use in rural areas.

Why are there fewer Internet users in rural areas than in urban areas? Researchers addressing this question typically focus on the lack of Internet infrastructure and demographic factors in rural areas. Rural areas often lack affordable Internet connectivity and contain relatively high numbers of people who are unlikely to adopt Internet connections at home—specifically the elderly and those without a postsecondary education. Although infrastructure and demographics are undoubtedly important factors, equalizing Internet adoption in rural and urban areas may require more than simply providing infrastructure that is affordable to a population of the right demographic composition. Drawing on the personal network approach and the concept of direct network externality, the author argues that the composition of personal networks in rural areas may hamper general levels of Internet adoption and high-speed Internet connection at home. To examine the empirical validity of this argument, the author conducted descriptive and multivariate analyses on data collected from a random-digit dial survey of 2,200 American adults.

Implications of software-based mobile media for social research

Software-based mobile media devices such as smartphones and tablets pose both theoretical challenges and methodological opportunities for social research. The first part of this article discusses how the complex, changing, and often idiosyncratic configuration of software-based mobile devices challenges the production of theoretical generalizations within and across populations. It is argued that overcoming this challenge involves attention to the mobile nature of these devices and focusing on clearly defined, widespread affordances. The second part of this article discusses ethical, philosophical, and theoretical issues surrounding the methodological opportunity to collect large quantities of behavioral data using software-based mobile devices.

A Plague of Viruses: Biological, Computer and Marketing

The article analyses the transfer of biological, computer and marketing viruses. Despite differences between these three types of viruses, network structure affects their spread in similar ways. The authors distinguish between two forms of networks - densely knit and ramified - and show that biological, computer and marketing viruses all behave in similar ways depending on the form of network. Densely knit networks promote the quick dissemination of a virus, and increase the odds that many of the members will become infected. Ramified networks allow a virus to disperse widely, jumping between different milieux. In the end, the spread of viruses in the real world involves a combination of both densely knit and ramified networks, which the authors call ‘glocalization’.