Tobias Escher at the OII

It might have been a bit quiet on this blog for some time which is usually not a sign of lack of activity but on the contrary of a lack of time due to so much going on. Luckily I have been able to get a bit more involved in teaching and recently I gave my first Oxford tutorial session. Tutorials are a special treat for Oxford students, being basically eight one hour long one-on-one seminars with scholars experienced in the field. In return, students have to read quite a lot and prepare an essay for discussion for each session.

Following the good example of my OII DPhil colleague Malte Ziewitz I post the reading list for this one tutorial session on the Death of Distance for social relations.

The general question is whether or not people use the Internet to have more long-distance social relations (e.g. friendships) than in the past. The background is that for most of human history most of our friends and acquaintances were people living close by, borne out of serendipity as the most common reason to get to know someone as well as the cost of (long-distance) communication. While the Internet does certainly remove the latter (and some might argue also the former) it is the subject of discussion of this tutorial whether this actually leads to a change in the structure of social networks, ie a development away from place-based communities to more spatially dispersed social networks. In the reading list I try to trace the historic roots of this discussion, get the views of important scholars on this subject and point to recent studies that offer empirical evidence.