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This article offers a definitional note of the dark social web and introduces the remaining articles in this collection.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected most organizations' working environment and productivity. Organizations have had to make provision for staff to operate remotely following the implementation of lockdown regulations around the world, because the pandemic has led to restrictions on movement and the temporary closure of workplace premises. The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of the effect of this transition on the productivity of work during the pandemic, by studying a distributed network of research who collaborate remotely. We examine how the productivity of researchers is affected by the distributed collaborative networks in which they are embedded. Our goal is to understand the effects of brokerage and closure on the researchers’ publication rate, which is interpreted as an indicator of their productivity. We analyze researchers’ communication networks, focusing on structural holes and diversity, and we take into account the personal qualities of the focal researcher such as seniority. We find that disciplinary diversity among researchers' peers' increases the researchers’ productivity, lending support to the brokerage argument. In addition, we find support for two statistical interaction effects. First, structural holes moderate diversity so that researchers with diverse networks are more productive when their networks also have a less redundant structure. Diversity and structural holes, when combined, further researchers’ productivity. Second, seniority moderates diversity; so that senior researchers are more productive than junior researchers in less diverse networks. In more diverse networks, junior researchers perform as well as senior researchers. Social capital and human capital are complementary. We conclude that the benefits of diversity on researchers’ productivity are contingent on the personal qualities of the researchers and on network structure. The brokerage / closure debate needs a more nuanced understanding of causal relationships.

This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist brings together seven contributions that explore different facets of the two overarching themes connected to digital automation. The first section of the issue delves into the complex ways in which digital automation interacts with preexisting social and economic institutions, specifically professions, markets, and formal organizations. The second section includes contributions that explore the cultural side of digital automation in terms of time and humanness. The issue concludes with an examination of the complex entanglement of digital automation and the covid-19 pandemic as they reshape the post-automation/post-pandemic economic landscape, including labor markets, jobs, consumption, and economic growth.

Although research has demonstrated a grey divide where older adults are less involved and skilled with digital media than younger adults, by treating them as a homogenous group, it has overlooked differences in their digital skills and media use. Based on 41 in-depth interviews with older adults (aged 65+ years) in East York, Toronto, we developed a typology that moves beyond seeing older adults as Non-Users to include Reluctants, Apprehensives, Basic Users, Go-Getters, and Savvy Users. We find a nonlinear association between older adults’ skill levels and online engagement, as many East York older adults are not letting their skill levels dictate their online involvement. They engage in a wide range of online activities despite having limited skills, and some are eager to learn as they go. Older adults often compared their digital media use with their peers and to more tech-adept younger generations, and these comparisons influenced their attitudes toward digital media. Their narratives of mastery included both a positive sense that they can stay connected and learn new skills and a negative sense that digital media might overwhelm them or waste their time. We draw conclusions for public policy based on our findings on how digital media intersect with the lives of East York older adults.

As a scholarly domain, social media research has come a long way since the term “social media” first appeared in the literature in the early 2000s. Since then, researchers across disciplines have been actively examining the impact of social media on society. According to Web of Science, there are currently over 19,000 academic articles that include the term “social media.” This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist adds to this rapidly growing body of social media research with a focus on exploring (1) networked influence, (2) transmission of (mis)information, and (3) online and offline, which points to an unstated struggle between top-down attempts by governments and large organizations to influence society and bottom-up citizen articulations of needs and actions.

This second issue continues our study of social networks and social capital in East and Southeast Asia. The articles show both similarities and differences in how each country’s social contexts significantly affect the nature of their social networks. The articles consistently show an Asian version of networked individualism, based on close kinship and friendship, hierarchies, strong work ethics, frequent travel, and digital media. In Thai villages, migrants send remittances to family members back home to honor broader village networks and norms. In China, migrants who come from wealthier village families have larger friendship networks in cities. In Hong Kong, cultural differences such as language limit social interactions between Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. In Singapore, population characteristics substantially affect inter-ethnic contact. While social norms circumscribe behavior on Twitter in Japan, Sina Weibo in China is a more chaotic space with much fraudulent practice. In Taiwan, online and offline networks combine to affect participation in voluntary associations. In China and Singapore, authoritative contacts and weak ties increase as well as reduce personal well-being.

There has been more hype than evidence about networked work. The researchers in the two parts of this double issue issue use survey, interview, and sensor data to present systematic evidence about how networked work actually works. The first part of the issue (April) presents four articles about how professionals network. The second part of the issue (May) focuses on a particular kind of networked work—scholarly networks—including studies of how such networks change over time. Taken together, these articles show that workers tend to network with similar others. Although they integrate digital media into their work lives, they nevertheless tend to work with nearby colleagues.

We study a multidisciplinary, geographically dispersed, and multi-institutional research network that shows the complex relationships in collaborative research. Although collaborative work ties declined, the number of friendship and advice ties stayed stable and acquaintanceship ties grew. Most researchers seem satisfied with the network and relish the opportunities for cross-disciplinary exchanges. The benefits of the network do not lie in the traditional academic output of publications and artifacts, but in intellectual exchanges, knowledge transfer, fostering long-term ties within and across disciplines and universities, and the development of a collaborative culture.

This special issue presents leading-edge work into how the characteristics of social media affect the nature of influence in networks. Our central thesis is that social influence has become networked influence. Influence is networked in two ways: by occurring in social networks and by propagating through online communication networks. We want to understand online social influence in its diversity: who is exercising influence, how it is done, how to measure influence, what its consequences are, and how online and offline influences intertwine in different contexts.

The notion of “community” has often been caught between concrete social relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the Internet has refocused our attention on this ongoing tension. The Internet has enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook, to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.

There is some panic in the United States about a possible decline in social connectivity. The authors used two American national surveys to analyze how changes in the number of friends are related to changes in Internet use. The authors found that friendships continue to be abundant among adult Americans between the ages of 25 to 74 and that they grew from 2002 to 2007. This trend is similar among Internet nonusers, light users, moderate users, and heavy users and across communication contexts: offline, virtual only, and migratory from online to offline. Heavy users are particularly active, having the most friends both online and offline. Intracohort change consistently outweighs cohort replacement in explaining overall growth in friendship.

This article analyzes the impact of new digital media on the residents of Chapleau, a remote rural town in Northern Ontario, Canada. As in urban situations, broadband e-mail in Chapleau facilitates communication with friends and relatives who live locally and far away. But unlike their use in urban situations, mobile phones are rarely used locally in Chapleau: They are for trips outside of town. Broadband use has aided health care, shopping, and information gathering. Indeed, it is the increased connectivity to the outside that stands out, making Chapleau much less of an “island.”

How does the Internet affect social capital? Do the communication possibilities of the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement interpersonal contact, participation, and community commitment? This evidence comes from a 1998 survey of 39,211 visitors to the National Geographic Society Web site, one of the first large-scale Web surveys. The authors find that people's interaction online supplements their face-to-face and telephone communication without increasing or decreasing it. However, heavy Internet use is associated with increased participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Further support for this effect is the positive association between offline and online participation in voluntary organizations and politics. However, the effects of the Internet are not only positive: The heaviest users of the Internet are the least committed to online community. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the Internet is becoming normalized as it is incorporated into the routine practices of everyday life.

The authors examine the experience of the residents of Netville, a suburban neighborhood with access to some of the most advanced new communication technologies available, and how this technology affected the amount of contact and support exchanged with members of their distant social networks. Focusing exclusively on friends and relatives external to the neighborhood of Netville, the authors analyze community as relations that provide a sense of belonging rather than as a group of people living near each other. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is treated as one of several means of communication used in the maintenance of social networks. Contrary to expectations that the Internet encourages a global village, those ties that previously were just out of reach geographically experience the greatest increase in contact and support as a result of access to CMC.

Has the Internet affected the ways in which people communicate by lessening the effects of distance? To examine this question, the authors study scholarly and interpersonal relationships—in person and by e-mail—in two scholarly networks, one in a large university and one dispersed across North America. These scholarly networks are harbingers of the turn toward network and virtual organizations. Although the Internet helps scholars to maintain ties over great distances, physical proximity still matters. Those scholars who see each other often or work near each other e-mail each other more often. Frequent contact on the Internet is a complement to frequent face-to-face contact, not a substitute for it. The more scholarly relations network members have, the more frequently they communicate and the more media they use to communicate. Although e-mail helps scholars without strong ties to stay in contact, it is used most by scholars who are collaborators or friends.

Since the mid-1850s, scholars have debated how technological innovation would affect community. The debate continues as the Internet makes it increasingly possible for people to socialize, shop, work, learn, and participate in leisure activities all from within their home. Will the movement of these previously public activities into the private realm lead to reduced participation in public activities? What will be the fate of community and social relations as a result of the growth of computer-mediated communication? Netville is a suburban Toronto development equipped with a high-speed network as part of its design. The clustering of homes within this area allowed us to study the social networks, civic involvement, Internet use, and attitudes of residents. This article explores the research approach of the Netville project and describes its main sources of data collection: surveys collected using computer-assisted interviewing and ethnographic fieldwork.