Barry Wellman

Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman are co-authors of the 2012 prize-winning Networked: The New Social Operating System (MIT Press). Wellman is also the editor of three books, and the author of more than 500 articles, often written with students.

Wellman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has received Career Achievement Awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association: Community & Urban Sociology; Communication and Information Technology. In 2008, he was the first person given the "Communication Research as an Open Field" Award, 2008, from the International Communication Association for a researcher who has "made important contributions to the field of communications from outside the discipline of communications." In 2014, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from the Oxford Internet Institute "in recognition of his extraordinary record of scholarship in social network theory and Internet research which has contributed so much to our understanding of life online."

Wellman has received career achievement awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, the International Communication Association, the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence, and two sections of the American Sociological Association: Community and Urban Sociology; Communication and Information Technologies. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2007. In 2012, Wellman was identified as having the highest h-index (of citations) of all Canadian sociologists. Wellman was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013. Since July 2013, he has co-directed the NetLab Network. Wellman was honoured with the Lim Chong Yah Visiting Professorship of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore in January–February 2015.

A 2007 paper, co-authored by Wellman (with Bernie Hogan and Juan-Antonio Carrasco), has discussed alternatives in gathering personal network data. A paper with Kenneth Frank showed how to tackle the problem of simultaneously analyzing personal network data on the two distinct levels of ties and networks. "Neighboring in Netville" has been cited as the only published study of personal networks from a known roster of potential network members. The most widely cited papers are the simplest: co-authored guides to analyzing personal network data while using the statistical software packages SAS and SPSS.

As a community sociologist, Wellman began arguing that too much analysis of life online was happening in isolation from other aspects of everyday life. He published several papers (alone and with associates) arguing the need to contextualize Internet research, and proposing that online relations – like off-line – would be best studied as ramified social networks rather than as bounded groups. This argument culminated in a 2002 book, The Internet in Everyday Life (co-edited with Caroline Haythornthwaite), providing exemplification from studies in a number of social milieus.

Wellman has edited Networks in the Global Village (1999), a book of original articles about personal networks around the world. In 2007, he edited a special issue, "The Network is Personal" of the journal, Social Networks (vol. 29, no. 3, July), containing analyses from Canada, France, Germany and Iran.

Wellman did empirical work in this area: he was part of a team (led by James Witte) that surveyed visitors to the National Geographic Society's website in 1998 and used these data to counter the dystopian argument that Internet involvement was associated with social isolation.

Wellman mentors graduate and undergraduate students in courses about community, social network analysis, and technology and society. He has co-authored with more than 80 students, including five undergraduates and one high school student. In 1998, he received the annual "Mentoring Award" from the International Network for Personal Relationships.

Until 1990, he focused on community sociology and social network analysis. During his first three years in Toronto, he also held a joint appointment with the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry where he working with D.B. Coates, M.D., co-directing the "Yorklea Study" in the Toronto borough of East York. This first East York study, with data collected in 1968, did a field study of a large population, linking interpersonal relations with psychiatric symptoms. This early study of "social support" documented the prevalence of non-local friendship and kinship ties, demonstrating that community is no longer confined to neighborhood and studying non-local communities as social networks. Wellman's "The Community Question" paper, reporting on this study, has been selected as one of the seven most important articles in English-Canadian sociology.

Wellman has often worked in collaboration with computer scientists, communication scientists and information scientists. In 1990, he became involved in studying how ordinary people use the Internet and other communication technologies to communicate and exchange information at work, at home and in the community. Thus his work has expanded his interest in non-local communities and social networks to encompass the Internet, mobile phones and other information and communication technologies.

Wellman's initial project ("Cavecat" which morphed into "Telepresence") was in collaboration with Ronald Baecker, Caroline Haythornthwaite, Marilyn Mantei, Gale Moore, and Janet Salaff. This effort in the early 1990s was done before the widespread popularity of the Internet, to use networked PCs for videoconferencing and computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). Caroline Haythornthwaite (for her dissertation and other works) and Wellman analyzed why computer scientists connect with each other – online and offline. They discovered that friendships as well as collaborative work were prime movers of connectivity at work.

A second East York study, conducted in 1978 and 1979 at the University of Toronto's Centre for Urban and Community Studies, used in-depth interviews with 33 East Yorkers (originally surveyed in the first study) to learn more information about their social networks. It provided evidence about which kinds of ties and networks supply which types of social support. It showed, for example, that sisters provide siblings with much emotional support, while parents provide financial aid. The support comes more from the characteristics of the ties than from the networks in which they are embedded. This research also demonstrated that wives maintain social networks for their husbands as well as for themselves.

His graduate work was at Harvard University, where he trained with Chad Gordon, Charles Tilly and Harrison White, and also studied with Roger Brown, Cora DuBois, George Homans, Alex Inkeles, Florence Kluckhohn, Talcott Parsons and Phillip J. Stone. He received a M.A. in Social Relations in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1969. His focus was on community, computer applications, social networks and self-conception, and his dissertation showed that the social identities of African-American and White American Pittsburgh junior high school students were related to the extent of segregation of their schools.

He has been married since 1965 to Beverly Wellman, a researcher in complementary and alternative medicine.

Barry Wellman was born and raised in the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road area of the Bronx, New York City. He attended P.S. 33 and Creston J.H.S. 79, and was a teenage member of the Fordham Flames. He gained his high school degree from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959. He received his A.B. (Bachelor's) degree magna cum laude from Lafayette College in 1963, majoring in social history and winning prizes in both history and religious studies. At Lafayette, he was a member of the McKelvy Honors House and captained the undefeated 1962 College Bowl team, whose final victory was over Berkeley.

Barry Wellman FRSC (born 1942) is a Canadian-American sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.