Friendworks in Australian Seachange Communities

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Orit Ben-Harush, whose interest is in communication in social networks, and she begins by introducing the idea of 'friendworks': that is, a specific group of people (considered as friends) within one's entire social network. Her study traced such networks in a small Australian seachange community in New South Wales, and also especially focussed on the use of mobile phones by this community.

Social network as a term is too broad for this sort of analysis - and while friends and friendship are rather vague terms in this context, they are nonetheless highly productive. Social networks overall include family, friendworks, work-related networks, location-based connections, and online relationships, and there are overlaps between these network components, of course.

The participants whom Orit studied had to form new networks once they moved to the seachange community, and mainly met new friends there through existing friendship connections. Friends thus function as social agents. Their dominant communication method with other participants in this case was mainly face-to-face, with only 15% nominating the Net, 13% the phone, and only 5% mobile phones - a sign not only of the spatial proximity of this community, but also of more general attitudes towards different communication methods. In more frequent interactions, face-to-face was most dominant, while Internet use (mainly email, and Skype for younger users) was more popular for less frequent communication (and popular here especially with older users, interestingly). Communication via mobile phones happened mainly with the immediate family,

Orit also asked participants to log their use of mobile phones, and found that 67% of such interactions took place within their friendworks. Only 7% interacted with their best friends over the mobile phone. Only 13% of mobile use was work-related. A major driver of such interactions was functional, to coordinate activities - even when communicating with friends.

Technorati : ANZCA 2009, communication, community, friendwork, mobile, network, seachange, social
Del.icio.us : ANZCA 2009, communication, community, friendwork, mobile, network, seachange, social