Are personal communities local? A Dumptarian reconsideration

Are local ties important in personal community networks? Since local ties only make up a minority of people's active ties, network analysts have argued for decades that the neighborhood is not very important. Re-analysis of the Toronto data shows that when contacts become the unit of analysis instead of ties, the percentage of local relationships in active networks nearly doubles. Moreover, when we also take into account active contacts with coworkers, who like neighbors are physically proximate, we find that two-thirds of all contacts are 'local'. As Humpty-Dumpty has cogently reminded us, a network can be anything we want it to be. It depends on how we define it. When we change the definition, the conclusions change too.