"In this talk I will explore the relative importance of online and offline social network ties for facilitating climate action. 

 

This is a potentially interesting issue for several reasons. There are divergent views about the importance and role of online social network ties. Some social movement scholars have argued that online collective action represents a new social movement phenomena, and that online ties have been central to particular social movements. Other social movement scholars have been skeptical about this.

 

Some social network scholars who study personal networks have argued that individuals interact with people in their personal networks through a variety of modes, and online is merely one of these modes. Further, individuals tend to interact with the same people both on and offline. Additionally, they argue that social media and online interactions are just one type of a long list of media that have been hyped as being revolutionary for altering personal networks, when in fact they merely add to the repertoire of ways that people interact.

 

In the social movements literature there is a significant tradition of studying the relationship between face-to-face ties and the participation of individuals in social movement activities, often through surveys, interviews, or available documents. In recent years that has been significant research on online social networks associated with social movements. This has partly been a response to claims that online interactions mark a new type of social movement phenomena. But such research has also been motivated to some extent by the ease of collecting such data. (Ease in the sense that many of the steps of gaining access to social movement participants can be skipped, and ease -- sometimes -- in the requirements of financial and other resources to conduct such research. Or at least this used to be the case, the situation is in flux.)

 

Despite the forementioned literature, there is a dearth of systematic research that examines the relative importance of online and offline ties, and their relationship to social movement actions. The study described in this talk sets out to address this. I will briefly talk about a pilot study where we collected both computational and survey data that pertain to this topic.

 

Finally, I will discuss a survey project that collected data from a socio-demographically representative sample of the Canadian population. For this study we collected data on people's personal network ties (online and offline, and combinations of these) to alters who supported or opposed the climate movement, and how this is related to various types of social movement activities such as individual participation in activism, and various types of pro-environmental behaviours. We also collected data on various social movement variables such as strength of identification with the environmental movement, as well as socio-demographic variables. I will discuss the theoretical implications of this research for the relative importance of virtual versus non-virtual ties, and also for computational research on social networks and social movements."