Does Distance Matter in the Age of the Internet?

Diana Mok, Barry Wellman and Juan Carrasco
Additional contact information
Diana Mok: Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, Social Science Centre, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada, dmok3@uwo.ca
Barry Wellman: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A1, Canada, wellman@chass.utoronto.ca

Urban Studies, 2010, vol. 47, issue 13, 2747-2783

Abstract: This study is part of the broad debate about the role of distance and technology for interpersonal contact. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that systematically and explicitly compares the role of distance in social networks pre- and post-Internet. An analysis is made of the effect of distance on the frequency of e-mail, phone, face-to-face and overall contact in personal networks, and the findings are compared with their pre-Internet counterpart whose data were collected in 1978 in the same East York, Toronto locality. Multilevel models with a spline specification are used to examine the non-linear effects of distance on the frequency of contact. These effects are compared for both very close and somewhat close ties, and for different role relationships: immediate kin, extended kin, friends and neighbours. The results show that e-mail contact is generally insensitive to distance, but tends to increase for transoceanic relationships greater than 3000 miles apart. Face-to-face contact remains strongly related to short distances (within five miles), while distance has little impact on how often people phone each other at the regional level (within 100 miles). The study concludes that e-mail has only somewhat altered the way people maintain their relationships. The frequency of face-to-face contact among socially close friends and relatives has hardly changed between the 1970s and the 2000s, although the frequency of phone contact has slightly increased. Moreover, the sensitivity of these relationships to distance has remained similar, despite the communication opportunities of the Internet and low-cost telephony.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098010377363 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:47:y:2010:i:13:p:2747-2783

DOI: 10.1177/0042098010377363

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().