Getting Closer or Drifting Apart?

Abstract

Advances in communication and transportation technologies have the potential to bring people closer together and create a "global village." However, they also allow heterogeneous agents to segregate along special interests, which gives rise to communities fragmented by type rather than by geography. We show that lower communication costs should always decrease separation between individual agents even as group-based separation increases. Each measure of separation is pertinent for distinct types of social interaction. A group-based measure captures the diversity of group preferences that can have an impact on the provision of public goods. While an individual measure correlates with the speed of information transmission through the social network that affects, for example, learning about job opportunities and new technologies. We test the model by looking at coauthoring between academic economists before and during the rise of the Internet in the 1990s.

Surfing alone? The internet and social capital: Evidence from an unforeseeable technological mistake

“…2 Performing transactions like shopping and banking on the Internet may deprive people from face-to-face interactions (Franzen (2003)). The Internet may also increase the separation of communication into separate groups with specific interests (sometimes referred to as "cyber-balkanization", see Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (1996)), so that even if it lowers individual separation, it can at the same time increase group separation and community fragmentation (Rosenblat and Mobius (2004)). Furthermore, communication through the Internet may miss a lot of the nonverbal information transmitted in face-to-face communication.…”

Social ties and coordination on negative reciprocity: The role of affect

“…In cases such as interaction at the work floor, informal credit institutions, scientific research, and political participation, more interaction might actually occur between friends than between strangers. In fact, as argued by Rosenblat and Mobius (2004), technological advances that reduce communication costs, such as the internet, can make interaction among groups of friends even more important.…”

Choosing peers: Homophily and polarization in groups

“…Similarly, for any s > 0; k B (s; t) is de…ned as the maximal integer h such that, no matter how 15 Under our assumptions on f A and f B ; if inequality (1) is satis…ed for h, it is satis…ed for any h 0 < h: many w A-contributions are made,…”