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.

Based on a sample of 5 million webpages from 15.000 websites in China with a total of 40 million external hyperlinks (i.e. pointing outside their website), they could built the following model:

Only a tiny minority of 6% of links does leave the Chinese web space. While this figure is more or less robust he tells me that the distinction between Home vs. Other provinces is still preliminary as it is based on geo-IP location. This might tell you where the server sits but not necessarily much about the “location” of the websites its been hosting. Therefore they are now trying to explore new methods including content mining. (The results have been presented in 2005 by Jonathan J.H. Zhu and Xiaoming Li at the Annual conference of Chinese Computer-Mediated Communication)

This research is exciting to me because it links back to my research topic that is also about the extent to which Internet use (in my case for creating and maintaining friendships) is locally focused. As a matter of fact, when coming to the Oxford Internet Institute my original plan was to do something along the lines of Professor Zhu and to use hyperlinks to assess the role of national identities online (you can have a look here). I eventually abandoned the idea amongst other reasons because it requires a considerable effort in terms of hardware etc. The more I am looking forward to hear more results from these ongoing efforts.

To compare some of the findings there is a useful review article by Han Wo Park and Mike Thelwall (2002) in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and a more recent study by Barnett and Sung (2005): Culture and the structure of the international hyperlink network. All point to the fact that hyperlinking behaviour seems to differ for different nations. Other notable research projects in this area have been undertaken by Robert Ackland who used to be a fellow here at the OII. He has been analysing the linking behaviour of political parties as well as environmental activist groups.