Geographic distance of social ties

Barry Wellman published an interesting article on geographic distance of social ties. Below is from his publication webpage.  I'm all intrigued.  I'll be soon posting stories on the Flickr counterpart.

"Does Distance Still Matter in the Age of the Internet?" (Diana Mok, Juan-Antonio Carrasco and Barry Wellman, Urban Studies, 2009).  Our study is part of the broad debate about the role of distance and technology for interpersonal contact. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically and explicitly compares the role of distance in social networks pre- and post-Internet. We analyze the effect of distance on the frequency of email, phone, face-to-face and overall contact in personal networks, and we compare the findings with its pre-Internet counterpart whose data were collected in 1978 in the same East York, Toronto locality. We use multilevel models with spline specification to examine the nonlinear effects of distance on the frequency of contact. We compare these effects for both very close and somewhat close ties, and for different role relationships: immediate kin, extended kin, friends and neighbours. The results show that email contact is generally insensitive to distance, but tends to increase for transoceanic relationships greater than 3,000 miles apart. Face-to-face contact remains strongly related to short distances (within five miles), while distance has little impact on how often people phone each other at the regional level (within 100 miles). The study concludes that email has only somewhat altered the way people maintain their relationships. The frequency of face-to-face contact among socially-close friends and relatives has hardly changed between the 1970s and the 2000s, although the frequency of phone contact has slightly increased. Moreover, the sensitivity of these relationships to distance has remained similar, despite the communication affordances of the Internet and low-cost telephony.