Barry Wellman

Barry Wellman was an American-Canadian sociologist, born on 30 September 1942, who taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto for forty six years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year term as the S. D. Clark Professor, and who later co-directed the Toronto-based NetLab Network. His research addressed community sociology, the internet, human-computer interaction and social structure as expressed in social networks within communities and organizations, and he wrote or co-authored more than three hundred articles, chapters, reports and books developing the idea of a paradigm shift from group-centered relations toward what he called networked individualism. He died on 9 July 2024.