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The notion of "community" has often been caught between concrete social relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the Internet has refocused our attention on this ongoing tension. The Internet has enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook, to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis of one person's Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.

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.

Has the Internet affected the ways in which people communicate by lessening the effects of distance? To examine this question, the authors study scholarly and interpersonal relationships—in person and by e-mail—in two scholarly networks, one in a large university and one dispersed across North America. These scholarly networks are harbingers of the turn toward network and virtual organizations. Although the Internet helps scholars to maintain ties over great distances, physical proximity still matters. Those scholars who see each other often or work near each other e-mail each other more often. Frequent contact on the Internet is a complement to frequent face-to-face contact, not a substitute for it. The more scholarly relations network members have, the more frequently they communicate and the more media they use to communicate. Although e-mail helps scholars without strong ties to stay in contact, it is used most by scholars who are collaborators or friends.

In recent years, the conceptualization of social support in the literature has become increasingly sophisticated, facilitating the consideration of more complex theories. Researchers no longer consider the mere availability of social ties, but look instead at the flow of specific resources through a social network. This article discusses how the social network has been defined in the context of social support. Research is reviewed, indicating how characteristics of individual tie (e.g., tie strength, proximity, frequency of contact, similarity) are related to the provision of support. Also examined are how characteristics of the personal network (e.g., size, density) relate to support and wellbeing. Statistical models for network analysis and how they should prove useful in studying social support are then discussed.

This article offers a definitional note of the dark social web and introduces the remaining articles in this collection.

AbstractWe used in-depth interviews with 101 participants in the East York section of Toronto, Canada to understand how digital media affects social connectivity in general—and networked individualism in particular—for people at different stages of the life course. Although people of all ages intertwined their use of digital media with their face-to-face interactions, younger adults used more types of digital media and have more diversified personal networks. People in different age-groups conserved media, tending to stick with the digital media they learned to use in earlier life stages. Approximately one-third of the participants were Networked Individuals: In each age-group, they were the most actively using digital media to maintain ties and to develop new ones. Another one-third were Socially Bounded, who often actively used digital media but kept their connectivity within a smaller set of social groups. The remaining one-third, who were Socially Limited, were the least likely to use digital media. Younger adults were the most likely to be Networked Individuals, leading us to wonder if the percentage of the population who are Bounded or Limited will decline over time.

As a scholarly domain, social media research has come a long way since the term "social media" first appeared in the literature in the early 2000s. Since then, researchers across disciplines have been actively examining the impact of social media on society. According to Web of Science, there are currently over 19,000 academic articles that include the term "social media." This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist adds to this rapidly growing body of social media research with a focus on exploring (1) networked influence, (2) transmission of (mis)information, and (3) online and offline, which points to an unstated struggle between top-down attempts by governments and large organizations to influence society and bottom-up citizen articulations of needs and actions.

How does the Internet affect social capital? Do the communication possibilities of the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement interpersonal contact, participation, and community commitment? This evidence comes from a 1998 survey of 39,211 visitors to the National Geographic Society Web site, one of the first large-scale Web surveys. The authors find that people's interaction online supplements their face-to-face and telephone communication without increasing or decreasing it. However, heavy Internet use is associated with increased participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Further support for this effect is the positive association between offline and online participation in voluntary organizations and politics. However, the effects of the Internet are not only positive: The heaviest users of the Internet are the least committed to online community. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the Internet is becoming normalized as it is incorporated into the routine practices of everyday life.