http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/people/gilbert/papers/chi08-rural-gilbert.pdf

In this research paper of UIUC, it is noticed that rural communities use modern social websites (ie facebook, myspace) in different ways than urban communities.

The social network of rural communities differ from the social network of urban communities . In general, rural communities are known to have more strong ties while urban communities are known to have more weak ties. This is quite logical, as the high population of urban communities means that people have more chances of meeting one another but probably less time to devote to each person, while vice versa for the low population density rural communities.

Upon these grounds, the researchers have hypothesized that rural members would use social websites in distinctly different ways than an urban user. For example, they expected fewer (but closer) friends, higher privacy settings, and closer proximity of friends in rural users’ accounts than urban users’ accounts. These hypotheses were substantiated with extensive data collected from myspace websites.

This material is highly relevant to the topic of social networks described in class. In chapter 3 of the book, there is some discussion on the extensions and applications of networks, such as adding the dimension of time to a network. This research is an extension of the social networks which were taught in class, as a rural/urban dichotomy is explored in this paper. All in all, this paper shows how demography can influence a social network and how social websites can be used to substantiate claims in network research.