Being social

Human beings become and remain social, across time and space, in and by communication. Communication accomplishes the socialization and acculturation of individuals in the mostly ordinary, if occasionally extraordinary, processes of their everyday interactions. This chapter introduces the idea of affordances from ecological psychology to specify the scaling of human communication and social networks in current communication systems. It draws on the ethnographic fieldwork data from each region to explore the contexts in which, and the criteria by which, people elect to engage in communication with others, and to make themselves available for communication in the first place. The chapter explores the extended range of ways in which it has become possible to be social through ‘social media.' It briefly considers the question of how communicative practices relate to people's affiliation with social and cultural organizations – which constitute consolidated, institutionalized indicators of specific ways of being social.