Barry Wellman

Barry Wellman (30 September 1942 – 9 July 2024) was an American-Canadian sociologist and was the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research were community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest was in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to ''networked individualism''. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.

Among the concepts Wellman has published are: "network of networks" and "the network city" (both with Paul Craven), "the community question", "computer networks as social networks", "connected lives" and the "immanent Internet" (both with Bernie Hogan), "media-multiplexity" (with Caroline Haythornthwaite), "networked individualism" and "networked society", "personal community" and "personal network" and three with Anabel Quan-Haase: "hyperconnectivity", "local virtuality" and "virtual locality".

Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman were co-authors of the 2012 prize-winning ''Networked: The New Social Operating System'' (MIT Press). Wellman is also the editor of three books, and the author of more than 500 articles, often written with students.

Wellman received career achievement awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, the International Communication Association, the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence, and two sections of the American Sociological Association: Community and Urban Sociology; Communication and Information Technologies. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) in 2007. In 2012, Wellman was identified as having the highest h-index (of citations) of all Canadian sociologists. Wellman was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013. Since July 2013, he co-directed the NetLab Network. Wellman was honoured with the Lim Chong Yah Visiting Professorship of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore in January–February 2015.

Wellman died after a long illness on 9 July 2024, at the age of 81. Provided by Wikipedia