ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that an appreciation for the relational web requires that it jettison sociology's traditional distinction between primary and secondary relationships. It also suggests that a jettisoning of sociology's traditional granting of primacy to primary relationships is also required. The chapter considers what consequences space and time may have for the presence and patterning of both person-to-person and person-to-place connections. To appreciate the range of indigenous connections found in the public realm, one begins by jettisoning sociology's traditional dyadic conception of human relationships. Primary relationships are presumed to involve the sharing of personal, biographical, idiosyncratic, often emotional aspects of self; in secondary relationships, only very limited categories of self are brought in to participate in the interaction. In terms of sheer volume, fleeting relationships are the most representative of public realm associational forms. Relationships of this sort are what sociologists are often referring to when they reiterate the classic distinction between primary and secondary relationships.
