In Good Company? Personal Relationships, Network Embeddedness, and Social Inclusion

Network on Social Inclusion

Up close and personal: social presence in mediated personal relationships

The likes of clarity and efficiency are good communication concepts for designers and evaluators of business communication tools. They make little sense, however, when the design context of an interactive system is the support of a personal relationship. What matters then is that people feel they are ‘there’ for one another. This paper describes a new way of understanding Social Presence in tec...

Personal effort in social relationships across adulthood.

We explored age differences in the amount of personal effort that people put forth to maintain relationships across adulthood in diverse family-life contexts. More specifically, we examined how personal effort in social relationships is age-differently related to emotional closeness and perceptions of reciprocity. A total of 658 early-midlife (37 years) and old-age adults (73 years) from three ...

Good Company

This is a delightful book, and in some ways an alarming one. It deals with the special entertainment films for children, produced by Mary Field for the J. Arthur Rank Organisation between 1944 and 1950. She called the book "Good Company", because her aim was to see that for a few hours each week, children should have an opportunity of "intimacy with good example", believing that "the friends yo...

Social Embeddedness and Agent Development

Entities that are meaningfully described as artificial ‘agents’ may be used by humans for many different purposes. Some of these purposes can be grouped by the abstract goals they are designed to fulfil. Two such goals are: to construct systems that meet certain performance criteria in a reliable way, which I will call the ‘engineering’ perspective and to act as models of social agents so to in...