I’ve seen a large change in my social interactions and social circles since coming to Vancouver for university. I grew up in a small town where the people I was closest to were not necessarily people who shared my values and aspirations, nor did I share theirs. The strongest social force keeping us together was the similarity of general attributes such as age, education and the context in which we knew each other. Since coming to university, I’ve found that my network expanded to people with who I did share many common goals and beliefs. While gaining these new connections, I simultaneously lost contact with most people from my hometown, aside from my family and a couple friends. However, after creating and analyzing my network in this activity, I still found that the underlying social structure keeping me close to the majority of my network is a geographic proximity and a similar education/occupation status. My data seems to support this, as the majority of my network are people who are also in university, particularly UBC, and have similar educational/occupational standings as myself. Additionally, the data collected about my means of communication with the people closest to me reveals that we communicate primarily offline rather than online, suggesting that these are not long-distance relationships and instead people that I see quite often.
The trends in my data also correlate with my group member’s. We all had high homophily ratings in the gender attribution of our data and comparable numbers in our education and context columns, with most of our data corresponding to fairly high homophily ratings as well. Our group was all girls, and all within a very similar age range. Therefore, these similarities in data suggest that maybe the importance of gender, education and context are some of the key attributes when it comes to people of our age, gender and social situation choosing people for their networks, respectively.
Besides the similarities between myself and my network, I found the connections between everyone in my network was generally very strong. All the people in my network had strong ties with at least 4 other people, suggesting they’re all quite connected. There could be several reasons for this, both personal and sociological. Personal reasons being that I want to have a tightly linked network and therefore I will familiarize my friends and family with each other. Sociological reasons being more general, but equally relevant. For example, the interconnectedness I found within my personal network is also clear on a much larger scale, and is the result of globalization. It’s difficult to compare the interactions of a small group of people with the interactions of nations, but I can see the uniformity most simply explained by World Society Theory: placing importance of institutions and cultural models on the way nations and individuals are shaped and behave. This seems to hold true for the connections between my network because cultural norms such as the use of social media essentially keeps everyone in my network connected. Additionally, it’s the institutions which we have access to that brings and keeps us together. For example, our universities, jobs and hobbies are all a part of our lives and play an intrinsic role in our connections. Looking at the people in my life right now, I see that I’m surrounded by people I admire, support, and rely on, making it all the more interesting to see the underlying social forces that keep me close to them, even though it feels like we are solely the ones keeping each other connected.