When Wellman conducted his early studies of social ties in 1968 and 1979,⁸ the results were relatively straightforward. Americans either telephoned (using traditional “landline” phones, of course)⁹ or saw each other in person — traveling by foot, car, mass transit, or airplane. Although the travel options have remained largely the same (except that airplane travel has become much cheaper and more routine), communication options have proliferated. Since the mid-1980s, cell phones have joined landline phones — so much so that some people no longer even have a landline telephone at home. During the 1990s, large proportions of the world’s population have joined the relatively small number of scholars and researchers who were the original internet users. The tools for electronic communication have expanded beyond the original email and Usenet messages to include instant messaging, group messaging on email lists, conversing in chat rooms, posting blogs, internet telephoning, and webcams.

Not only have the means of communication proliferated, but the reach of communication has increased. It is as cheap to email someone across the ocean as it is to email them across the street. With transoceanic visits still relatively expensive and rare, and with transoceanic phone calls entailing careful time-zone juggling, the asynchronous (store-and-retrieve) nature of email makes communication across time zones much more achievable. While phone calls remain largely between two persons (or at most, between two households on extension phones), email and IM make it easy for many people to communicate at once.

Furthermore, the cost of communication itself has gone down — whether people use the telephone or the internet. Once Americans have invested in the cost of computing equipment and flat-rate monthly communication charges, they can communicate almost for free.