Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age

Mary Chayko

feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

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How do we become connected to people we have never met in person? From celebrities to faraway relatives, from favorite writers to thinkers to people we meet on-line, we form a host of subtle, invisible, but very real social connections with distant others. In Connecting, Mary Chayko investigates how physically separated people manage to create a sense of connectedness—a "meeting of the minds"—and feel undeniably, if unexpectedly, bonded. Through dozens of personal accounts, the book considers the social "fallout" of connecting with absent others—the benefits and hazards—on our societies, communities, relationships, and individual selves. The result is a comprehensive yet intimate look at social bonding as it is rarely recorded: an examination of the bonds and communities we form across great distances, and even across time, in the age of the Internet.

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Mary Chayko is Assistant Professor and Chair of Sociology at the College of St. Elizabeth.