ABSTRACT
Relationships make a difference. In a digital age, our personal ties still matter to us, as individuals and as members of groups, and we often put a great deal of effort into maintaining them. As individuals, we are defined at least partly by whom we know and how we know them. More broadly, bonds between people also serve as building blocks of the larger social edifice. Of course, these ideas are not new. On the contrary, they shaped the
discipline of sociology from its origins. Emile Durkheim, for instance, was particularly interested in the ways that people’s social ties served as the threads from which society was woven together. Durkheim drew a sharp contrast between the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of pre-modern societies, based on inherited hierarchies and familiarity based on similarity, and the ‘organic solidarity’ of the mobile, complex, urban social systems of his own times. The interdependence of strangers meant that modern society:
… does not become a jumble of juxtaposed atoms … . Rather the members are united by ties which extend deeper and far beyond the short moments during which the exchange is made.
