In the past, the vast majority of people lived in rural areas and small towns where it was truly shocking to encounter a genuine
stranger, but today most of us live in cities where we are constantly surrounded by total strangers, which leads directly to: a. suburbanization
b. a demographic transition
c. social atomization
d. increased divorce rates
e. white flight
When positioned into the field of sociology, atomism assigns the individual as the basic unit of analysis for all implications of social life. This theory refers to "the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms".
