Last week, we have introduced what “networked individualism” is. We said that our social life is such a fuzzy concept, clear-cut division into groups and sub-groups are realistically impossible. Rather we live within a complex network of individuals. While social networks have been around us for a long, long time, we haven’t really explored it as it is. Instead, we have used the “group-based” perspective often, because it is cognitively easier. Along with the new ICTs, however, this perspective is gaining its currency, and the academia recently began to develop a new sociology of community, based on this network-based perspective.
The popularity of this new perspective is quite obvious from the book publications. Google N-gram is an interesting tool which traces book titles back to the year of 1800 (Show the website).What we can see fromNgram is, there has been an increase of book title with the word “group” or “groups” during 1900s. This reflects that our efforts to understand the group behaviors come along with the development of sociology and psychology in general. (Sociology and Psychology began to be studied hard since late 1880s and forth).On the other hand, around since mid-1970’s, there is decreas of the book title. Now, lets search the titles with “social network” and “social networks”. Around the similar time period of decreasing of book title “groups”, there are increase of “social network” and, particularly in 2000s, there are noticeable increase of “social networks”. The book titles are rather specialized, so the total percentages are much lower compared to “group”. Even so, we can see that there has been some new perspective introduced since around 1970s.What this mean is that, social network-based understandings are not radically new, particularly along with the Internet technologies. It has been in a steady growth. Today, we’ll talk about this less radical, long-standing social changes that characterize Network Individualism.
According to the book authors, networked individualism is the product of Triple Revolutions. Today, and next class, we will focus on social network revolution. The following weeks, we will cover Internet and Mobile Revolution.
If you think about what “Widespread connectivity” means, what comes to your mind first?
The biggest part of the emergence of widespread connectivity is due to Physical Movement. And Physical movement is closely related not only with transportation but also with telecommunication development and globalization
This is a global telecommunication flow about 10 years ago. Results won’t be that different. What you can see here is that the US is in the center of global telecommunication.
This is the hyperlink traffic (internet website links) in 2010. Incoming hyperlinks means that other countries send links to a particular country. So for example, the US shows the noticeably dark- brown color in comparison to other countries, which means that the US has a heavy incoming hyperlink traffic. So, websites in other countries links the US websites intensely.
Global Trade
The original “Ugly Betty” between 1999 and 2001 in Columbia.
Still, predominance of the US in cultural and commercial, communication global traffic
There are a few evidences. First, our household composition shows a lot different from a decade ago.
Family households: Married with either children or no children; Single parent Nonfamily: one person or other non-family Here, we need to ask this question, however. “Does this decrease of traditional forms of family households mean that we are apart from families or intimate social supports?”
• From 1990 to 2008, the percentage of people who never attend religious services rose from 13 percent to 22 percent.• Just 45 percent of adult respondents born after 1970 reported growing up with religiously active fathers.• In the 1960s, about 1 percent of college freshmen expected to become clergy. Now, about three-tenths of a percent have the same expectation.• The percentage of people saying they have a great deal of confidence in leaders of religious institutions has declined from about 35 percent in the 1970s to about 25 percent today.However, we need to ask again, “if these numbers mean that our society has become less spiritual or atheistic.” Actually, the response about belief in Spriitualism and the existence of God did not decrease. So, these number changes represent that we are not associated with the fixed religious institutions or religious groups that much anymore, but not necessarily mean that we are getting less spiritual.
In line with the decreased church affiliation, our engagement in formal voluntary organizations has been dropped. For example, town-hall meeting, bowling leagues, etc. Instead, however, what has increased is the various types of “ad-hoc” participation. Here, “Ad-hoc” means that you do not make that much commitment to a particular organization as a long-term members, but still do something when there are like-minded activities going on. Once the action is done, you and other participants know that it is fine NOT to maintain the relationships with them, anymore. Once shot, and that’s all. One example of such “Ad-Hoc” engagement is Flash Mob. Often this Flash Mob shapes a type of community involvement. I’ll show you one classical Flashmob, which happened in New York in a big scale. Let’s watch. Now, it’s definitely fun and people do not know each other actually. However, by encountering via this mode of one-shot event, what you can feel is a sense of community, a affinity toward where you live, and somehow trust toward each others. A good feeling among those who engaged in this moment. However, they won’t compose any persistent group, organization, or community. Once the game’s done, they will be apart, and very likely that they won’t meet up each other.
TV fragmentations: More channel diversity. From 1985-2002
So, we are now talking about three social changes that leads to Social Network Revolution. And Social Network Revolution is one of the three revolutions that define “Networked Individualism”. Theses three social changes are (1) widespread connectivity – we talked about globalization, physical movement and telecomm development. (2) weaker boundary of group – we talked about the change in household compositions, religious affiliations, civic participations, and cultural heterogeniety. (3) Last one is the increase personal Autonomy. This is more about work-related issue. Work hours and spaces become flexible. And, companies began to cancel out Pension system, instead adopt independent retire and health plans. Pension is good, because it is guaranteed as long as you stick to the company for your rest of your life until retirement. However, there’s less chance for job movement. On the other hand, introducing Independent Retire and health plans, you can change the job more easily and without risking your retired life, if you don’t like it. Now, we can see that this increased personal autonomy is also related with the physical migration.