Activity 1: My Personal Network
During the analysis of my personal network, I established that the contexts/Institutions that had the greatest impact on me was my Family and High school, Pre-school and College. After my parents divorce, I became close to my mother/her family and lost touch with my father/his family completely. However, the surprising conclusion was that my social institutions were equally split into two: ‘Friends’ and ‘Family’. My self-assumption prior to this activity that my ratio between friends and family would, favor the former was proved wrong. The first insight created within my personal network was that I do have a strong sense of family as a social institution within my network, which has shaped my values and mannerisms. Reiterating Charles Cooley: my family does indeed serve as a primary group in my primary socialization.
Referring to social inequality, my nationality/race and social class have demarcated my personal network. Coming from the middle-higher class strata in western India, Bombay: I found the “strange in the normal” when I realized how jarring it was that my personal network was not economically diverse whatsoever. In India, I’m surrounded by the dichotomy of rich and poor. Within my personal network there is a complete hemophilic (-0.1) measure for social status. Moreover, my nationality shaped my network as majority (-0.6) of my network share the same nationality, sociocultural practices as me. With the E-I index of -0.2 for the amount of ‘Students’ under ‘Occupation’ in my network, I gathered that I’m deeply affected by people my own age, whose lives run parallel to mine through education. Since I’m to major in Psychology, the E-I Index measuring who in my personal network are studying or have previously studied Psychology read to be -0.067. This revealed that even my aspirations are influenced by the network I surround myself with!
Within my personal webwork, my mother and childhood best friend have the maximum ties. This structure of interconnectedness depicts: the closer an individual, the more ties to other individuals. My network reveals dense connectivity, but does not create distinct groups. My friends and family have both strong and weak ties with one another. The one evident group created is my friends under “UBC/college” in ‘Context/Institution’ who only have ties within themself. The strong ties wound between between people are not because of them knowing me, but the weak ties created are through my facilitation.
The three people in my closest circle are my two childhood friends and mother. The second tier of closeness encompasses the people who I’ve known from my adolescence and the least close people are people I’ve met relatively recently. Thus demonstrating a connection between the number of years of the relationship and their closeness to me. My biography further clearly indicates that most of my network was introduced to me in my childhood, less in my adolescence and even less in my young adulthood/UBC.
My experiences have limited me in some critical ways. The cloistered and conservative Indian culture, has socially defined my university experience and me. As a first year I haven’t been completely socialized to Canada. This has affected the way I behave as an individual within other social groups. However, I only realized the social mannerisms I inculcated from UBC once I was in back in previous social setting, India. This made me think about Symbolic Interactionism, in which George Mead and Charles Cooley stated that the meanings of things arises from social interaction and as such is constantly in flux. The meaning behind expressing gratitude or a greeting is completely unalike because of the different manner of interaction in each unique society.