Are local ties important in personal community networks? Since local ties only make up a minority of people's active ties, network analysts have argued for decades that the neighborhood is not very important. Re-analysis of the Toronto data shows that when contacts become the unit of analysis instead of ties, the percentage of local relationships in active networks nearly doubles. Moreover, when we also take into account active contacts with coworkers, who like neighbors are physically proximate, we find that two-thirds of all contacts are 'local'. As Humpty-Dumpty has cogently reminded us, a network can be anything we want it to be. It depends on how we define it. When we change the definition, the conclusions change too.
1. How liberated are 'liberated communities'?
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more nor less," the noted postmodernist, Humpty-Dumpty, asserted a century ago (Carroll, 1872, Chapter 6). The same is true for social networks. There is not any such thing as 'the network', although many of us persist in writing as if this were so. How we define the members and ties of a network strongly affects what we will find out about it.
Roberto Fernandez (1993) stimulated my meditations on this when he wrote in his review of Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid (1993):
... Barry Wellman, Barrett Lee, and others have shown [that] with improvements in communication and transportation, social relations may have been 'liberated' from geography. (1993, pp. 365-366).
My thanks to Milena Gulia who prepared the tables for this note, to Nancy Nazer, Thy Phu and Bev Wellman for their editorial comments, to Charles Wetherell who in the course of our collaboration started me rethinking the local nature of personal community networks (see Wetherell et al., 1994), to Barry Leighton who collaborated in developing the original 'community liberated' argument (Wellman and Leighton, 1979), and to Lewis Carroll, the nineteenth century's preeminent postmodernist.