CORE NETWORKS, SOCIAL ISOLATION, AND NEW MEDIA

Abstract

Evidence from the US General Social Surveys (GSS) suggests that during the past 20 years, people have become increasingly socially isolated and their core discussion networks have become smaller and less diverse. One explanation offered for this trend is the use of mobile phones and the Internet. This study reports on the findings of a 2008 survey that replicates and expands on the GSS network methodology to explore the relationship between the use of new technologies and the size and diversity of core networks. The findings conflict with the results of the 2004 GSS, i.e. we find that social isolation has not increased since 1985. However, the current study supports the conclusions that the size of core networks has declined and the number of nonkin in core networks has diminished. Mobile phone and Internet use, especially specific uses of social media, were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity. In discussing these trends, we speculate that specific social media provide for a ‘pervasive awareness’ within personal networks that has increased the specialization of close ties. We argue that this same pervasive awareness provides for heightened surveillance of network members, the result of which is a higher level of perceived diversity within networks based on metrics that include political affiliation.

Keywords:

• social networks
• social support
• social media
• Web 2.0
• pervasive awareness

Notes

This approach is consistent with how McPherson et al. (2006) presented ‘nonkin network size’, but is inconsistent with how the ‘at least one nonkin confidant’ variable was presented.

All cases are weighted to reflect the population. Cases from the 1985 GSS are weighted as a function of the number of adults in the household (ADULTS). Cases from the 2004 GSS are weighted using the variable WTSSNR.

As a result of recoding the ‘more than 5’ category from the GSS data, and minor coding errors that have been corrected in the 2004 GSS data set (Smith 2008), the means and standard deviations reported in Table 1 are slightly different than those reported by McPherson et al. (2006).

When the 1985 and 2004 GSS were reanalysed with our stricter interpretation of ‘nonkin’, the difference between the 1985 and 2004 GSS in the number of Americans who report at least one nonkin confidant was considerably smaller. Previously, the per cent of Americans with at least one nonkin confidant in 1985 was reported as 80.1 per cent and in 2004 as 57.2 per cent (Marsden 1987; McPherson et al. 2006).

To test the possibility that the relationship between new technology use and network size and diversity does not hold based on the combined core network measure from 2008, the earlier analyses of network size and diversity based on the single ‘important matters’ name generator was replicated. Because the findings largely replicate the pattern found based on ‘important matters’ alone, they are not shown here, but can be found at: http://www.mysocialnetwork.net/ics/supplement.pdf.