Geography and proximity play significant roles in the networks we have. Discussing with my peers, I discovered that many of them grew up in the city of Vancouver or nearby. This meant that their personal networks included interactions established well before the university context, with people such as work colleagues, high school friends, and sports teammates.
Myself, having moved from Calgary to Vancouver for university meant that I had to create a network from scratch. After arriving in the city, I began investing in a strong community on campus and formed a tightly knitted core group of friends. My high network cohesion became apparent when doing the mapping exercise, where I noticed that my personal network appeared very dense. Most of the individuals in my network had close ties with one another, with weak ties existing between the majority of them. This made sense when looking back at attributes that I used to for categorization. The individuals in my network operate within a very specific geography of the university context.
While the network map provided a visual insight, the E-I index was a qualitative method that I used to calculate homophily. All of the attributes I used to measure this index showed high homophily (i.e. education, occupation, age, religion) except for one, race. I identify myself as Taiwanese-Canadian. My roommates come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. I share a roof with a Swiss-born German, an American with mixed European roots and a Zambian-born, Tswana (person from Botswana) born to Indian parents. In the multicultural context of Canada and to a more local extent, the city of Vancouver, this example of hyper-globalisation has become the norm.
World Society Theory is a theory of globalisation that states that there is increasing homogenization of individuals due to an idea of world culture (Meyer 144). Reinvestigating the attributes where homophily existed in my personal network, I see values embedded within this “world culture” framework. A framework of social constructs indicating that if one is in their late-teens (age), and falls into a certain income bracket (class), that the formal institution of university (education) is the appropriate option. These global set of values and beliefs have defined my history and will continue define my future. Geographical distance no longer acts a barrier, but rather as evidence for this increasingly integrate, interrelated network.
The scales of global to local can be understood through the concept of sociological imagination proposed by C. W. Mills (1959). My roommates often share personal narratives about the societal problems faced by their respective countries by presenting them at a relatable, micro scale of the individual, and then extrapolating them to macro, societal issues. As insightful as these experiences are, every individual has a bias in their perceptions and the enlightening inferences one makes about society as a larger whole can be equally ignorant to the parts unseen.
So while the multiethnic house I live in is an example of how a global society and its “world culture” has affected individuals such as my roommates and myself, the homophilies present in this network provide a narrow scope of society. It is a biased concentration of commonalities in a hyperlocal space despite our personal hyperglobal geographies.
Literature Cited:
Meyer, John W., John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco O. Ramirez. 1997. “World Society and the Nation-State.” American Journal of Sociology 103:144-181
Mills, C. Wright. 1959/2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York. Oxford University Press.