Will the Real Social Networks Please Stand Up?
A new year means new resolutions. So right below exercise more on your tenuously-committed-to list, be sure to squeeze in one more item:
Stop confusing social media with social networks.
Why bother with a pedantic exercise as nitpicky as when to use who and whom in an email? Because this slight of hand between the two concepts is more than just a quibble of semantics. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are interchangeably (and carelessly) swapped with the empirical and theoretical frameworks collectively called social networks.
True social networks aren’t found in the digital 1s and 0s of the inter-webs, but the relational webs that interconnect people with one another.
These networks form and buttress the structures of society. As 2017 also ushers in a vastly new political reality, differentiating social media from in-the-flesh social relations that define our society is necessary to navigate the malaise of a post-fact and seemingly hyper-partisan America.
First, let’s explain what social networks are and aren’t by starting with a bit of history. The German sociologist Georg Simmel (pronounced “zim-el”) introduced modern social network analysis as a framework to understand the fundamental building blocks of a society: relationships. He described the social geometry that related people to one another: father to daughter; teacher to student; friend to friend; king to subjects, and so on. This starts with a single thread between two people, called a dyad. These dyads interconnect and percolate to form larger shapes (triangles, squares, and pentagons, oh my!) to create groups, communities, cities, nations, and eventually a society.
The resulting structure is a visually dizzying web of relations, which are as multifaceted as they are plentiful, with networks constructed from friendships to reporting relations in a large company. Social media companies have built their businesses on these relations, but true social networks they are not. (How many of your Facebook friends do you consider actual friends?) If social networks are an imprint of the structure of society, then social media is an imprint of an imprint, at best. Yes, social media enables our self-segregation tendencies from those who differ in our tastes, cultural proclivities, and political opinions. But in the end, fake news and polarized newsfeeds are merely symptoms of a changing America. Real social networks can help us understand what coastal and rural, liberal and conservative “bubbles” actually mean.
Indeed, “bubbles” aren’t at all new.
They’ve always existed in some form or another throughout history. As Simmel aptly pointed out, there’s always some social distance between people. In fact, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a vital part of our socialization process. (Studies have shown we can only manage upwards of 150 meaningful relationships. For the time being, this seems to be an evolutionarily limit.) And we minimize our distance to people who are more like us than not.
In social network terminology, this is called homophily — or how birds of a feather flock together — and it is one of the most powerful byproducts of social networks.
Yet, as Simmel also noted, two people don’t need to know each other and can still both belong to the same abstract community, like a country. That is, you don’t need to know every American to be an American, because we all share a common understanding and mythos about what it is to be an “American,” Johnny Appleseed and all. (This is referred to as the “imagined community” thesis.) The marvelous juxtaposition that allows America to exist is how coastal latté-sipping liberals and God-fearing rural conservatives can all claim membership in the same club.
Then what do we make of our current situation? To say that we’re a bitterly divided country along the urban-rural, Left-Right divide is too simplistic, as we’ve always been several countries stuffed into one.
What we’re witnessing, perhaps, is not growing polarization, but a reorientation of what these bubbles or networks are, what they mean, and how they relate to one another in America.
Some argue that the forces of globalization (read Neoliberalism) have shattered communal networks, making us feel isolated. Global metropolis dwellers are extending beyond national borders, while the stagnant or dwindling populations in rural areas are seeing their connections to an imagined community severed. (Progressives and Liberals ought to worry about this, if not only from an socioeconomic-class perspective, but from a cultural identity one, as many disenfranchised communities stereotypically associated with urban areas — people of color, LGBTQ, etc. — are in these isolated areas.)
The truth of the matter is that we don’t all have to exist in the same bubble to ease this current reorientation (in fact, there’s research that suggests hearing what everyone has to say at the same time inhibits innovation), but exposing yourself to diverse ideologies may help.
The “strength of weak ties” hypothesis, one of the most powerful in social networking theory, broadly argues that we live in echo chambers and only learn about something new, if not contradictory, from a source we hardly interact with. Reaching beyond our social networks to understand why others see the world the way they do is one step. But the devil is in the details, as such extensions are hard and a bit perfunctory. This will require more social grunt work than “Liking” or “Sharing.” Indeed, one study suggests that we have such a viscerally hostile reaction to hearing challenging political opinions because we internalize them as attacks on our identity, on who we are as a person.
We make networks as much as networks make us. And reaching out for and hearing contradictory opinions is not acquiescence. It doesn’t justify nor excuse the truly hateful, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and islamophobia rhetoric, beliefs, and actions. And, to be fair, my argument is structural: I’ve focused on the “pipes” and not what’s flowing through them, which in many cases is pure sewage. We will always live in echo chambers and bubbles, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s what makes a democracy! If networks do (to some degree) make us, we need to make sure that the networks of the future include those who may not fully grasp the implications of what they presume to hold true.
Charles Gomez, sociologist, got his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Sociology and Global Comparative Education. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at U.C. Berkeley.
