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 identify some general patterns of how people in the three world regions of the study become social, in and through a range of media modalities. Furthermore the chapter explore the context in which, and the criteria by which, people elect (not) to engage in communication with others, and to make themselves available to various social networks, small and large. A third section of the chapter explores, the extended range of ways in which it has become possible to be social through "social media". Departing from the notion of scalable sociality (Miller et al. 2016), the authors examine the different kinds and degrees of being social that social media afford, and which turn out to vary not just with world region but also with different spheres of human and social activity. In the final section the authors briefly consider the question of how communicative practices relate to people's affiliation with social and cultural organization - which constitute consolidated, institutionalized indicators of specific ways of being social.