Latent contacts are those people you would contact, but for some reason, have not contacted. A natural example is the connection of podcast researchers in education; as people developed expertise in the subject the would reach out to other people in the same field, if they knew they existed. Eventually these latent contacts do make a connection, usually via blog or email. But of course, it didn't used to be that way (they would have to read each other's academic articles and connect by mail, telephone or at conferences). The point of this paper is to show that the internet has increased the connectivity of latent contacts. We would intuitively assume this to be so, but it's nice to have some research showing that it is so, and to tell us a bit about it, even if the sample size (246) is on the small side.
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