Reasons to bound, to share and to interact.

You got #sharingiscaring, but is it true? Is sharing really caring, and why? Why do we, humans, want to share? Is it something that is in our nature? Another question is why we want to bound with other people. How do we choose the people we want to bound with? There are many ways to interact. But the way we interact has changed. Nowadays we interact by just simply hitting a “like-button’.

Bounding and sharing is all about trust, about the same norms and values and being consentient as a group.A quote from the OESO explains it (Coté en Healy, 2001): ‘networks together with shared norms,values and understandings that facilitate cooperation within or among groups’. This definition makes it clear that there are collective relationships between people within and between populations who understand each other’s opinions. The more participation and the more trust, the more likely it will be that networks arise with common values and norms.

The social cohesion framework also provides a third dimension: the integration. This concerns in the first place the extent to which all members of participate in a society and have confidence. There is more integration in a society such as people from different groups - young people, the elderly, high and low educators, higher and lower incomes, people of different religious, cultural or national backgrounds - are committed to and trust each other. This will result in more understanding of each other’s opinions, shared values and norms, and cooperation between population groups.

The way we socialize had changed. It looks more important than ever. Or is it more noticed? Previous research has shown that people who have frequent contact with acquaintances also have more close relationships (Kloosterman and Van der Houwen, 2014). Apparently, the frequency of contact says something about its quality, but it remains the question of whether the ever-increasing technological capabilities that social networks like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter offer keep the intensity and quality of the contacts up to date with the frequency of contacts.

About three out of ten people have contact with family and friends in 2014. With the neighbors this is less frequent: 16 percent see or speak their neighbors

every day. In 2014, 83 percent had contact with the family at least once a week. With friends it was 77 percent and with neighbors 62 percent. The data on quality of social contact show that both the share that, in its own right, has only superficial contacts, if the proportion that is satisfied with social contacts has not changed since 2012. This was, and still is, between 14-84 percent.

The proportion that says there are people who really understand them, fell by a fraction between 2012 and 2013, but remains above 80 percent. This percentage did not change in 2014. In addition, only 3 percent say nobody really understands them. Four percent expressed dissatisfaction with the social contacts.

So, the frequency is becoming less. We think we got social by using social media, but the truth is that our social contact is getting more superficial.

Alana Jansen