[This post expands on an invited talk to a conference on “Distance by Design” at the Taub Center for Social Policy, Jerusalem, Nov. 2, 2021.]
A defining feature of the modern world is that people are in quick, even instantaneous, contact. Media scholar Keith Hampton put the key change this way: Our newest communication technologies create persistent contact—we never really have to lose touch—and pervasive awareness—we always know what’s going on with those who matter to us. The new tools can actually restore, he suggests, many features of village-like community.
1st telephone, 1875
(https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016816952/)
As earlier communications technologies emerged over a century ago, many observers ventured predictions about their consequences. In 1881, Scientific American editors said that the telegraph was bringing forth the “kinship of humanity.” Starting in the 1890s, some people asserted that the telephone would “abolish loneliness.” Over centuries, many have claimed that mail, telephone, automobile, radio, and the like would finally keep youth on the farm, others that they would make all places and regions culturally the same. These failed predictions should humble anyone claiming to know what today’s novel technologies are bringing.
Caution is warranted, too, because people often use new technologies in unanticipated and even paradoxical ways. (For example, fast cars enabled many voyagers, previously train passengers, to slow down and enjoy stops along the route.) In this post, I look at how contemporary Americans deal with barriers of distance in ways that, despite all our space-transcending tools, have actually reinforced the importance of place.
Managing Distance by Staying in Place
One response to the problem of being far from people one cares about is to stay near. Contrary to the common image of modern people as restless and rootless, westerners have become increasingly able and increasingly determined to stay in their communities. Geographic mobility in the U.S. keeps on dropping in the 21st century, as it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. (See earlier 2010 and 2016 posts.) This graph updates the trends. It shows, for 1948 to 2019, the specific percentages of Americans who had changed residences in the previous year; and it shows, for decades going back to 1850, a rough estimate of those moving rates.
This greater rootedness, I have argued, is the result of more economic security, physical safety, and insurance protection for more Americans. Dreadful housing insecurity persists today, but it was far greater in earlier eras when fires, droughts, floods, business cycles, accidents, deaths of family earners, and the like sent millions of Americans on the road to somewhere else.
Modern communication and transportation technologies contributed both to encouraging moves—because one could leave and still stay in touch with family—and to mitigating reasons to leave—because one could have access at a distance. One study suggests that recent information and communications technologies contributed, in net, to reducing mobility.
This trend toward staying put, which appears in other western societies, alarms economists. People clinging to their depressed communities, spurning economic opportunities elsewhere, makes for an inefficient labor market and extended underemployment.
Staying in place has further, paradoxical implications: For one, even as Americans moved more often and farther in the course of a day—especially commuting—they moved less often and nearer in the course of a lifetime. For another, as distances between places impeded interaction less, specific places became more valued sites of interaction. Increasingly, Americans have cared more about where they live than about that place’s proximity to somewhere else. We see this, for example, in working Americans choosing to live in rustic settings even if that means a long drive to their jobs and see it also in retired Americans moving to warm climes. Place over space.
Managing Distance by Staying or Getting Nearer
One feature of any home is who else lives nearby. Many Americans, especially working-class ones, prefer to be near family and friends, even if they could be farther away; many decide to move in order to be near. Thus, even in our high-tech age, people live close by. In a 2013 survey, three-quarters of respondents reported having at least one adult child or a parent residing within 30 miles and one-third reported that all their parents and adult children lived that close. Even people’s Facebook “friends,” who could be scattered across the nation and the globe, are concentrated: 63 percent of them live within 100 miles.
How much the average separation between people and those who matter to them has changed over time is harder to discern, but one study compared 1986 and 2001 surveys administered in seven countries (including the U.S.) and found no change in any country in how far away, measured in travel time, people lived from their mothers. Even in the Internet and cellphone age, people stayed near or came nearer.
Managing Distance by Staying in Contact
Americans have overcome separation by staying in contact, both by traveling and by using media ranging from the early telephone to today’s smartphone. In a recent poll, almost half of Americans said that they talked to their mothers every day. In-person contact, too, has been sustained. The seven-nation study I mentioned earlier, for example, found no change in face-to-face contact with mothers between 1986 and 2001.
The next graph shows trends in face-to-face interaction in the U.S., 1974 to 2018. Those years span the era when no one had a personal computer to the era when about 80 percent of Americans had smartphones. The surveys asked respondents how often they spent a “social evening” with relatives, with neighbors, or with friends “outside the neighborhood.”
We see essentially no change in the percentage of respondents who spent at least several evenings a month with relatives or who spent that many evenings with friends outside the neighborhood, but a ten-point decline in the percentage who spent several evenings a month with neighbors. (By the way, the consistent engagement with relatives is yet more striking given that American families are smaller now than they were over 40 years ago.) A sophisticated analysis of these data through 2008 concluded that there was little net change in in-person sociability since the early 1970s (see also here).
The research is not unanimous. One study suggests that the increase, between 1965 and 2000, in mothers working outside the home and the greater hours that mothers and fathers cared for their children reduced couples’ social visiting. But overall, there is little sign that four decades of e-communications noticeably undercut in-person sociability.
Adding together how often Americans communicate at a distance (like phoning mom) to how often they see family and friends in person reveals that the total volume of personal contact has, in net, increased (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Survey research I and colleagues conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 2010s showed that most people, even those in their 50s and 60s, used cellphone calls, texting, and emails to stay in touch with family and friends. Other studies suggest that internet use promotes better social and psychological well-being among elderly Americans (e.g., here and here).
All this does not mean that 21st century media have freed us from distance; distance still creates “friction” in ties; and in-person contact remains important in social relations (e.g., here). As we have seen, people—especially those with fewer resources to manage distance—value being near family and friends, often value that proximity enough to make economic sacrifices. Distance has not been erased and its remaining, even if diminished, importance shows up in yet other paradoxes.
One such paradox extends the one about space versus place: the practice of transnationalism, living in more than one nation at a time. My favorite illustration is the cab driver who zips about Manhattan while in constant conversation with a relative in their home village in Bangladesh or Nigeria. Such people are committed to two specific home communities no matter the vast distances.
Another paradox is that peoples’ distant friends tend to be, on average, more intimate and important to them than their nearby ones. Why? Because of selection. Because distance remains a burden, we tend to stay in touch with only those faraway friends whom we feel are “worth” the hassle and the long breaks; meanwhile, we maintain ties that are not nearly as emotionally close to us with people who are physically close and thus “cheap.”[1]
But What of Relationship Quality?
This brings us to the pervasive worry that distant, technologically-mediated relationships are not really intimate, but emotionally impoverished and that they displace rich face-to-face ones. This past Thanksgiving, Harvard historian and New Yorker columnist Jill Lepore published an excellent essay in The Guardian on the intellectual history of the idea that society is dissolving and leaving only isolated individuals. Lepore recognizes that this same alarm has been sounded for centuries, but nonetheless seems to accept it; she does not ask whether the intellectuals’ history is in fact accurate. It is not. (See earlier posts here and here.)
A more accurate account is, in brief, that modern American social ties have over a century or two become less given and more chosen, less kin-based and more friend-based, no less supportive, and surely more intimate and confiding. (Some have even described a “feminization” of social bonds: women have cajoled men into talking about feelings.) While these trends may seem largely positive, they can be double-edged. If you are freer to leave a relationship or friendship, so is the other person. If you expect others to empathize with you, you are expected to empathize with them. Still, the long-term trend is toward more, not less, intimacy.
What, then, of the “epidemic of loneliness”? The British have just gotten themselves a UK Government Minister for Loneliness (belatedly, 50 years after the Beatles sang “All the lonely people/ Where do they all come from?/ All the lonely people/ Where do they all belong?”). The scholarly consensus, however, is—bracketing the Covid-19 pandemic—that there has not been an epidemic of loneliness in the U.S nor in western societies generally (as discussed in posts here and here and reviewed in more detail in endnote #2 below).
An often-accompanying question is whether the internet has increasingly isolated and damaged people. The short answer is, overall, no (though for some particular people the answer might be yes). First, let’s recognize that using “the internet” encompasses so much: answering trivia questions, shopping, working, finding driving directions, filing taxes, staying in touch with far-flung kin and friends, playing games, confirming an appointment, etc., etc. Social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which have been the focus of much concern, are but one domain of the internet. The research, even on social media alone, presents mixed conclusions. Second, the internet and social media specifically tend to magnify individual differences. They enable the extroverted to be yet more sociable and enable the socially anxious to be yet more withdrawn; they fuel creative people’s ingenuity and fuel neurotic people’s anxiety. Indeed, magnifying differences could be said about other interpersonal technologies, like the telephone, as well. The overall consequences range from neutral to positive, although there are certainly situations deserving real concern. (See more discussion in endnote #3.)
The Covid Experiment
The Covid pandemic has provided a great experiment for the world on sustaining social ties with far fewer in-person meetings. Millions—billions?—reacted by turning more to electronic communications. In one survey, 90 percent of Americans said that the internet had been important to them socially; two-thirds said that it had helped replace face-to-face ties although they preferred to see people in person. In research done in France, where lock downs were much more severe than in the U.S., survey respondents reported broken ties with some friends but more intense ties with family and neighbors (an intensity that involved both greater solidarity and greater conflict).
What will happen when Covid finally fades? Probably much distance work—and distance learning, healthcare, entertainment, family celebration, intimate conversation, etc.—will continue. “Hybrid” social life may be the fashion of the future. My best guess is that the online dimension will continue but only as a modest supplement to things as they were. I doubt, for example, that more such distance interaction will reverse the trend toward place over space, toward more rootedness; indeed hybridity may accentuate that trend.
Closing
In thinking about technology and personal relations, it is simplistic, lazy, and misleading to think in terms of “impacts,” that somehow the telephone or the smartphone is doing something to us or to our social connections. Instead, people deploy communications technologies from the telegraph to Zoom to manage distance, to manage it in pursuit of social goals such as staying emotionally close to intimates who are far away and also to staying physically close to other intimates. And thus, we get the paradox of easy, fast, cheap, persistent, and pervasive communications encouraging less residential mobility and more valuing of place.
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————————- ENDNOTES ———————-
[1] Here is a snippet from the UCNets research. We asked respondents to list people active in their lives, their “social contacts.” And we asked respondents to tell us to which of the listed people they felt especially close and to also tell us which ones lived within or beyond an hour’s drive. This chart shows that, among relatives, those physically close and those physically far were just as likely to be rated as emotionally close to the respondent, about 65%. But among non-relatives, those who were physically farther were more likely, at 49%, to be described as emotionally close than were those physically near, at 33%. (I also discuss this paradox in a 1977 book.)
[2] Isolation and loneliness research: Three overviews—one recently by a U.S. Senate committee staff, one recently by a science journalist, and my 2011 book—are skeptical about any such increase. A few studies that suggest a possible increase in isolation or loneliness are: Anttila, Twenge, Wrzus, and perhaps Petev. Many studies find no increase, including: Ang, Antonucci, Campbell, Hulur, Suanet, Verdery, Wang, and Weiss.
[3] The two most well-known critics claiming pernicious effects of the internet seem to be Jean Twenge (e.g., here) and Sherry Turkle (e.g., here). (For popular critiques of Twenge’s arguments, see here and here; my critique of Turkle’s argument is here.) A key, legitimate concern with respect to social media and social isolation is passive viewing. (Valid worries about social media inflaming conflict are another matter). Simply and continually scrolling through the feed seems to lead some youth to feeling left out and judging themselves badly (see Hunt; Thorisdottir; Sherlock). More generally, however, the vast research literature suggests limited consequences for social bonds. In studies published just since 2019, a few show negative effects, usually of social media specifically (e.g., Allcott), many show negligible overall effects (e.g., Coyne; Downey; Karsay; Odgers; Orben; Sewall), and a few suggest positive overall effects (e.g., Stuart; Pew). Some also find methodological problems in the internet effects research (e.g., Parry; Sewall; Coyne). No doubt some people suffer from “Facebook Addiction Disorder” (Brailovskaia), just as many people suffer from all sorts of addictions. No doubt, too, there are consequences of smartphone use beyond any on social ties—for example, distracting parents doing childcare (Abeele)—but the moral panic around the internet has exaggerated effects (including in the adolescent girls on Instagram scandal of Fall, 2021; see here) and neglected the myriad other uses of the internet.
MADE IN AMERICA 