people in your hometown who collect antique soda bottles or who believe that Earth
is flat, but you can go online and meet hundreds. People who are afraid or embar-
rassed to discuss their interests at home, such as practitioners of witchcraft or S&M,
also find that they can feel safe in Internet message boards and chat rooms. However,
there are also thousands of Internet groups formed around more conventional inter-
ests, such as sports or movie thrillers.
Message boards and chat rooms allow us more creativity in playing roles than
we have in live interaction. Even in everyday social interactions, we often engage in
impression management (Goffman, 1959), emphasizing some aspects of our lives and
minimizing or ignoring others. We may pretend to have beliefs, interests, and skills
that we do not, to fit better into a role. For instance, we may put “fluent in French”
on our resumé to impress potential employers, when actually we can barely manage
to ask for directions to the nearest Métro station. However, online we can adopt com-
pletely new roles and statuses, changing not only our skills and interests, but our age,
ethnicity, gender, and sexuality at will. Researchers are still studying the impact of
this fluidity on the sense of self.
Social networks sustain us; they are what communities are made of. At the same
time as our networks are expanding across the globe at the speed of light, there is
also some evidence that these networks are shrinking. A recent study by sociologists
found that Americans are far more socially isolated than we were even in the 1980s.
Between 1985 and 2004 the size of the average network of confidants (someone with
whom you discuss important issues) fell from just under three other people (2.94) to
just over two people (2.08). And the number of people who said that there is no one
with whom they discuss important issues nearly tripled. In 1985, the modal respon-
dent (the most frequent response) was three; in 2004, the modal respondent had no
confidants. Both kin (family) and nonkin (friendship) confidants were lost (McPher-
son, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears, 2006).
The sociological consequences of such increasing isolation are significant. His-
torically, we have seen cities as dangerously large and alienating, where individuals
have to struggle to build networks of support. By contrast, rural life has been seen as
sustaining us in the support networks of kin and friends in small towns. It is there-
fore surprising that in the United States suicide rates
are significantly higher per capita in rural areas than
in urban ones (Butterfield, 2005). Remember that
Durkheim might have predicted this; because cities
have greater “density,” they offer more opportuni-
ties for sustaining support and social interaction.
On the other hand, in some ways, young peo-
ple today are far lessisolated than their parents
might be. The Internet has provided users with a
dizzying array of possible communities of potential
confidants, friends, and acquaintances. People who
have never met find love, romance, sex, and friend-
ship in cyberspace. Some specific forums have been
created to assist us—from finding potential cyber-
sex partners to marriage-minded others. People
report revealing things about themselves that they
might not even tell their spouse. And some partici-
pants in these forums actually meet in person—and
a few actually marry! Some sites, like Friendster,
simply provide a network of people who know other
people who know other people who... know you.90 CHAPTER 3SOCIETY: INTERACTIONS, GROUPS, AND ORGANIZATIONSMySpace and other networks
utilize the ever-expanding web
of the Internet to create new
communities of “friends”
whom you will never meet and
to offer an opportunity to
create the identity you want
to present to the world. n
Source:Homepage from MySpace website, http://www.Myspace.com
<http://www.Myspace.com>. Reprinted by permission.