Sociability internet

SOCIABILITY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET

At the very centre of our social life there lies a striking paradox. On the one hand, our mutual availability has never been greater. On the other hand, fear of increasing social isolation has never been more present. How is it possible that in a society in which the technologies of interpersonal communication are so developed that presently there are virtually no people or places beyond reach, most people have a recurring sense of ever decreasing personal interrelatedness. Are these self-same technologies to blame for this feeling, as is often thought, or are there some underlying social processes at work here? Ultimately, is technology powerful enough to separate us from our nature, offering us surrogates for our social life?

It is our conviction, and we will endeavour to prove it throughout this book, that although technology undoubtedly affects our lives, it's rather a product than a generator of our aspirations. After all, if this were not the case, there would be no paradox to speak of, as omnipotent communication technologies would otherwise make us feel connected in the manner countless cable strands and radio waves connect us physically. However, as long as our need for sociability exceeds the current potential of surrogates offered by technology, we need not fear for it.

Bering that in mind, the aim of this book was to explore the manner and the extent to which modern information-communication technologies, specifically the internet, have become integrated into the existing network-based form of social behavior, as well as to determine their social function.

On a theoretical level, we analyzed the internet as a technology that mediates the interpersonal communication which sprang to life in the midst of society at a peculiar historical moment and as a result of a radical phase of modernization, or rather, a global social transformation gathering momentum in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A major characteristic of the transformation in question is the growing individualization of social relationships due to their disembedding out of the localized contexts of social interaction which coincides with social networks increasingly becoming a central form of organizing social interaction in modern society. What we find crucial is that communication technologies, especially the internet, play a very important role in the process of social reembedding by enabling the relationships lifted out from the immediate context of interaction to be reestablished or by generating entirely new relationships regardless of spatial or temporal restrictions.

On an analytical level, our premise was that the internet proves highly instrumental in the process of organizing individualized persons into viable social networks, most obviously so in its two basic functions: transmissional and procreative. The transmissional function refers to the internet’s contribution to maintaining existing offline relationships, with the internet acting as a channel for social interaction. The procreative function relates to creating and maintaining new online relationships, with the internet serving as the space for social interaction. Having adopted a wide analytical approach, the study highlights the differences between these two communicational functions occupying different segments of the interpersonal interaction in (internet users’) social networks.

On an empirical level, our goal was to verify the theoretical-analytical hypotheses with Serbian internet users. To this end, we conducted both a quantitative research, based on a sample of 1063 respondents, and a qualitative one, through 15 in-depth interviews. The findings of the research have corroborated the starting hypotheses, allowing us to deduce that the wider the personal networks of internet users become, the more they rely on the internet to foster relationships in these networks as well as that the internet is positioning itself as the key medium for supporting tenuous or geographically encumbered relationships. In addition, we have offered conclusive evidence that using the internet for establishing new social relationships does not correlate with internet users’ diminished sociability and that the internet can help create social capital.