From Door-to-Door to All Over the Place

Reading Wellmans insight into the rise of networked individualism has reminded me of my own recent, and now very obvious transition from a distinctly door-to-door community, to a place-to-place community. This

I spent the first fews years of my university life living at a college on campus. Like most others I had just moved to Brisbane and only knew a few people, thus my new social network was formed primarily by people at College. This was very much a door-to-door community. There was no need for computers to communicate, everyone lived in a single locale and everybody knew everyone else. However, naturally my time spent there would come to an end and very similar to the phenomena described by Wellman (allbeit on a much smaller scale, as outside the college environment we were all already involved in place-to-place communities) there was an evolution of the college social networks from a door-to-door community to a place-to-place computer supported network.

We were now spread out geographically and became dependent on technology such as mobile phones, email, MSN and cars to communicate. Now we were in a place-to-place networked community. I mean, I knew who my immediate neighbours were but beyond that relied on computer power to maintain social connections. Several of the implications that have been outlined by Wellman which could be clearly observed were;

• active maintenance of people’s sparsely-knit ties and fragmented
  networks. By contrast, it is easier for people in groups to sit back and let
  group dynamics and densely knit structures do the work. That is why
  friendship networks are less apt than kinship networks to persist in times
  of overload.

It was now necessary to activley maintain relationships as you would not see literally everyone several times a day on a daily basis.

• a shift in the proportion of interactions away from those based on
  ‘ascriptive’ characteristics people are born with - such as age, gender, race
  and social class - and towards those based on ‘achievcd’ characteristics
  that they have adopted throughout the life course - such as lifestyles,
  shared norms and voluntary interests.

For example, some people graduated and began full time work, thus underwent significant lifestyle changes.

• reduced identity and pressures of belonging to groups.

As people were no longer geographically tied, there was no longer the pressure of also being sociall tied.

I find this transition interesting as it is an example of how a theoretical phenonema described in the readings and lecture, whether I liked it or not, played itself out in my real life. It's not like I'd decided, 'right I've had enough of door to door, I'm gonna go try living in a place to place community', that is just what happened.

Identifying and understanding such trends can be important tools for marketers/advertisers as they show how people interact and communicate, thus revealing how best to target specific markets.

All this reminds me of an old zen proverb...

"If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understant, things are just as they are..."