Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Bernie Hogan, Barry Wellman and Eric Miller. 2008. “Collecting Social Network Data to Study Social Activity-Travel Behavior: An Egocentric Approach.” Environment and Planning B: in press. http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=b3317t {doi:10.1068/b3317t}

Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Bernie Hogan, Barry Wellman, and Eric J. Miller, “Agency in Social Activity and ICT Interactions: The Role of Social Networks in Time and Space.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie [Journal of Economic and Social Geography]: forthcoming

Diana Mok and Barry Wellman with Ranu Basu. 2007. “How Much Did Distance Matter Before the Internet?” Social Networks 29, 3 (July): 430-61

“Does Distance Matter in the Age of the Internet?” (Diana Mok, Juan-Antonio Carrasco and Barry Wellman).This is the first study that systematically and explicitly compares the role of distance in social networks pre- and post-Internet. As part of the Connected Lives project, we analyze the effects of distance on the frequency of email, phone, face-to-face and overall contact in personal networks. We also compare the findings with its pre-Internet counterpart whose data were collected in 1978 in the same East York, Toronto locality. We use multilevel models with spline specification to examine the nonlinear effects of distance on the frequency of contact. The results show that email contact is generally
insensitive to distance, but tends to increase for transoceanic relationships greater than 3,000 miles apart. Face-to-face contact remains strongly related to short distances, while distance has little impact on how often people phone each other at the regional level. The study concludes that email has only somewhat altered the way people maintain their relationships. The frequencies of face-to-face and phone contact among socially-close friends and relatives have hardly changed between the 1970s and the 2000s. Moreover, the sensitivity of these relationships to
distance has remained similar, despite the communication affordances of the Internet and of low-cost telephony.
[Presented to the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, St. Petersburg, FL in January 2008; Probably in a journal in 2009; now on my website.