Jeff Boase, PhD Candidate
Sociology

PhD thesis: The relationship of personal networks to email and other communciation media


Supervisor: Barry Wellman (SOC)

Jeff will receive his PhD in the November 2006 convocation. He has just started a 2-year post doc funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research council at the University of Tokyo. Jeff can be reached at jeff.boase@gmail.com

Profile
[KMDiary 2003 Issue #12]

If you saw Jeff Boase on a wintry Toronto street corner, hands in his pockets, iPod-fed Jazz in his ears, youd have no idea what was on his mind. In the New Year, a thousand Americans will. As part of his Ph.D. research with Barry Wellman in Sociology, Jeff has been advising the Pew Internet and American Life Foundation on the development of a large-scale survey documenting how CMC (Computer Mediated Communication, such as email or instant messaging services)affects the size and structure of social networks. The payoff of this study could be considerable. Similar field research to date has concerned only strong ties (social relationships, like those in a family, typified by deep emotional connection, altruism and reciprocity). The Pew will open insights into the ties that most interest Jeff, weak ties, the more accidental and occasional connections we make in work and life.

Quietly confident and extremely well-spoken, Jeff makes specialized academic research not just understandable, but also meaningful. CMC, he explains, should allow people an efficient means of maintaining weak ties over time, and, in addition, of increasing their number. Such ties provide access to new ideas and information--if you can't figure something out, find someone in your address book who can. But the benefits could be more than instrumental. You will be exposed to experience you weren't looking for. Weak ties tend to be more diverse, crossing demographics. By supporting such networks, CMC could conceivably be fostering social tolerance and a new kind of integration--an ingenious counter to the complaint that technology is steadily dehumanizing society.

Typical of KMDI Fellows, Jeff has more than one major project on his To Do list. A complementary, Canadian, CMC-use study turns to the Toronto borough of East York. Jeff is one of the leaders planning a foray that will combine everything from on-the-go ethnographic observation to face-to-face interviews to in-depth survey work, and hes lending it an expertise that has garnered international recognition. His learning curve probably peaked in 2001, when, through NetLab, he became principle designer of the Internet and community components of the National Geographic Survey. Jeff worked tirelessly at the backend, establishing validity, checking response categories, and, because of his computer proficiency, landing the job of managing the intricate, spreadsheet-based coding (an unavoidable feature of a survey conducted globally in six languages with 6,000 respondents). 

A number of co-authored articles followed from that research, including the first-ever international comparison of Internet users and uses, a study that puts substance to the rhetoric of the global digital divide. More recently Jeff has written on mobile telephone and Internet use in Japan, part of an immersion in Japanese culture that followed his internship with NTT Laboratories and Kyoto University. There he joined the Intercultural Collaboration Experiment (ICE) team to study how computer programmers from different countries collaborate through Internet-based translation software. Back in Toronto, Jeff began an international collaboration of his own, working with two Japanese scholars and learning Japanese on the side.

His credentials continue--the only student among his peers chosen twice for an NSF-funded international summer webshop, the only student member of a select SSHRC planning group for a new national integration research program, Netlab student leader, Fellow of Massey College--but you wont hear these from him. Jeff favours the group, letting his leadership vision work from the inside out. His passion for research, however, is overt. He will show you a questionnaire as attentively as if it were a family photo album. Conversation moves through notions of extended memory and trans-biological evolution to the range of philosophical strands his work adumbrates (when he makes it, a reference to Foucault doesn't sound pretentious). Another turn leads to the manipulation of digital imagery, a spare-time hobby that comes with a discussion of perception that could hold its own in a Fine Arts program. Despite his surprisingly lateral thinking, Jeff never loses his focus. When asked for a 5-year plan, he responds succinctly: Research. In his case, that speaks volumes.