An overview of empirical findings, emerging theories, and challenges to the ego-centric perspective in the study of social media and digital technologies broadly. The relationship between social media use and network size and diversity has been discussed in relation to topics that include social capital, social support, political engagement, and mental health. We explore the role these technologies play in shaping networks, and how the ego-centric perspective can advance the study of social media. Two trends – persistent contact and pervasive awareness – are explored for their potential to counter transitory, segmented personal networks. The ego-centric perspective can play an important role in the study of social media, which has primarily focused on understanding how media works as an agent of change, while overlooking opportunities for research related to social influence and network flows. However, ego-centric researchers face methodological challenges, including the risk of overgeneralizing from social media platforms to personal networks more broadly, and the role of algorithmic personalization. We end with a discussion of how ever shifting social media platforms remain a barrier to advancing one of the most promising opportunities for the ego-centric approach: combining relational data from social media platforms with data from other sources, such as surveys.

Survey methods that randomly sample respondents from populations abstract their subjects out of the settings where social phenomena form and develop. By measuring the egocentric networks that surround respondents, surveys can re-incorporate these interpersonal contexts. This chapter reviews approaches to egocentric measurement implemented within the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS). Among these are global items that obtain direct reports about network properties (e.g. size, composition), short sets (aggregated relational data, position generators) that allow estimation of certain network properties, and longer name generator instruments that obtain more granular data on the individual contacts (“alters”) and relationships within a respondent’s egocentric network. The review gives particular attention to the “important matters” name generator for measuring “core” networks, first administered in the 1985 GSS. It covers that instrument’s origins and subsequent use in both substantive and methodological research. Substantive studies show how networks vary by (e.g.) age, socioeconomic standing, gender and residential setting, and offer suggestive evidence about how they shape outcomes including well-being, political activity, and sociopolitical attitudes. Methodological studies reveal that the important matters name generator can be sensitive to several aspects of survey settings, and call for care in its administration.

This chapter introduces the idea that relationships are a fundamental component of human nature, but there is a limit on the number of relationship partners humans can have and maintain. This chapter introduces the idea of the core network (or the two to five most important people in your life), the first fifteen (i.e., the primary members of your personal network), and two outer layers of relationship closeness. This chapter explains why social interactions are a valuable unit of analysis for studying relationships, and why both personal relationships and social interactions are important contexts for the study of mobile and social media. This chapter introduces a relationship-centered approach to understanding media and presents assumptions about why relationships are important and how media is in the service of those relationships.

The recent years have brought into the forefront of cognitive neuroscience a mechanistic representation of the world in the cognitive system – cognitive maps. A “zoo” of different cells transforms the immediate experience of wandering in the environment into a maplike representation, written again and again in specific brain structures. Here we claim that another component is crucial for forming and interpreting these maps – the experiential and imaginary self. Through the concept of mental travel we explain how the self may be projected prior to the use of cognitive maps and how the world is referred to the self through the cognitive map. Biases and influences of the self may further affect the maps formation and interpretation. The concept of mental orientation is then suggested to include the experiencing self and the way in which it relates to the environment, as represented on cognitive maps, not only in spatial navigation but also in the processing of time (memories and plans), people (social world), and even abstract concepts.

Research concerning the relation between memory and imagination has focused increasingly on how memory contributes to imagining or simulating future and other hypothetical events. According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (Schacter and Addis, 2007a, 2007b), episodic memory plays an important role in supporting the construction of imagined future events by allowing the retrieval and flexible recombination of elements of past experiences into simulations of possible future scenarios. Further, the hypothesis holds that the same flexible recombination processes that are useful for simulating possible future experiences can produce memory errors that result from miscombining elements of past experiences. A growing number of experimental studies during the past decade have examined various aspects of this hypothesis. Here, we consider (1) cognitive studies that have tested key elements of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; (2) neuroimaging studies that have elucidated the neural underpinnings of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis; (3) recent experimental evidence linking flexible recombination and episodic simulation processes with memory errors; and (4) ways in which the conceptual focus of constructive episodic simulation hypothesis has changed over the past decade.