APPLICATION OF A CAD-BASED EXTENSIBILITY MODEL

The goal of the study is to show how social power and communication are related. The relationship is not a simple matter of quantity, with more powerful people communicating more. Nor are the "powerless" simply receivers of information sent by the "powerful." Less powerful people may actually spend more time communicating at the national and international scales, through the use of media such as newspaper, radio, and the Internet. They do not passively absorb this information but use media to establish a meaningful relationship to the world: combining sources, seeking out information related to their interests, mixing news and entertainment, comparing news sources, and then passing on their world-views to friends. With the aid of new media and new home-based work patterns, these communications can overlap the periods of the day that are spent working.

The five people I studied are part of a social network: each one is linked somehow, via communication, to at least one of the others during the course of a single day (shown in purple arcs). About half of their communications are with people in the same room or building, "proximate" communications, but the other half are mediated communications using the telephone, Internet, radio, television, written materials, and other media.

A primary finding is that different jobs imply radically different rhythms of activity in time-space, from the hour-long communication situations of a professor reading a book and giving lectures to the short, staccato rhythm of phone communications handled by a receptionist at a busy office.

The study uses Vellum, a CAD (computer aided design) program, to model people’s connections through time and space. Since the CAD models are stored as a set of objects in a database, they can be rotated and examined from various angles. The display can also be changed to show various types of communication, for example only two-way communications such as telephone or one-way communications such as radio and television.

For more information see:

Adams, Paul. "Bringing Globalization Home: A Homeworker in the Information Age" Urban Geography 20 (4) (May 16-June 30, 1999):356-376.

Adams, Paul. "Application of a CAD-Based Accessibility Model." In Information, Place, and Cyberspace, ed. Donald Janelle and David Hodge (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2000): 217-239.