Social Networks

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Typology

Danah Boyd:

"I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.

Sociological "personal" networks. Sociologists have been working hard to measure people's personal networks and much of the theory of social networks stems from analysis done on these networks. Different scholars have taken different approaches to measuring personal networks, but, most stereotypically, this takes the form of a clipboard and pencil as a young grad student queries an individual to recall who they talked to yesterday and indicate who they would lend money to or call when they are having an emotional breakdown. On classic measurement survey is an appendix in the back of Claude Fischer's "To Dwell Among Friends."

Most sociological theory stems from analyses of these personal networks. Social capital, weak ties, homophily, ... all of those theories you've heard about are based on personal networks. Given that these are typically measured by eliciting people's understandings of certain categories (e.g., "friend"), there's a strong overlap between everyday language around social networks and the categories being measured.

If you're a sociologist talking to anyone other than sociologists, you would probably speak of personal networks as the golden standard, the baseline truth. Of course, if you were being honest with yourself or your colleagues, you will note that these measurements have their methodological flaws and biases which is why the scales for measuring personal networks haven't stabilized and why scholars still struggle with the best ways to elicit meaningful information from people being surveyed.

Behavioral social networks. Behavioral social networks are the networks derived from encounters between individuals. In their efforts to measure personal networks, sociologists have often tried to get people to manually document encounters with others through diary studies. With new technologies in place, folks have gone on to generate behavioral social networks through the traces people leave behind. For example, a record of someone's email exchanges provides a handy accounting of that individual's behavioral network. New technologies introduces new opportunities for measuring behavioral networks. Many genres of social media let us see who communicates with who. GPS technologies let us see who shares physical space.

Behavioral social networks provide valuable insight into people's practices and interactions, but they do not confer meaning. This is not to say that they don't have value. I would love to find the strangers that I regularly share space with as I traverse Boston. But we cannot assume that these are my friends or acquaintances. Yet, there seems to be a tendency (especially among geeks of all stripes) to overlay meaning-laden terms on top of these networks, to assume that high connectivity means friendship. This is where trouble often arises. Just because I spend a lot of time with my physical therapist does not mean that she is more important than other people in my network who I see less frequently.

The other difficulty in measuring behavioral social networks is that, at least to date, we measure distinct channels of connection. This complicates our ability to do meaningful comparison across people. If I use AIM as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person A and email as my primary way of keeping in touch with Person B and you only look at one medium, you get a distorted picture of who I communicate with. As communication channels proliferate, this only gets messier. So even when we talk about behavioral social networks, we have to talk about them in across a particular channel.

Publicly articulated social networks. Articulated social networks are the social networks that you intentionally list. In some senses, this is what sociologists are eliciting, but people also articulate their social networks for other purposes. Address books and buddy lists are articulated social networks. So too are invitation lists. Most recently, this practice took a twist with the rise of social network sites that invite you to PUBLICLY articulate your social network.

At this point, I would hope that most of us would realize that Friends != friends. In other words, who you connect to on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter is not the same list of people that you would say constitute your closest and dearest. The practice of publicly articulating one's social network can be quite fraught because there are social costs to the process of public articulation. Issues of reciprocity emerge and people find themselves doing a lot of face-work to navigate the sticky nature of having to account for their social relations in a publicly accountable way. Thus, the list of who you might list as a Friend is often a mix of friends, acquaintances, family members, people from your past, fans, professional colleagues, familiar strangers, and people you don't particularly like but don't want to offend. Oh and the occasional celebrity you think is interesting." (http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/07/28/would_the_real.html)

History

History of academic disciplines studying social networks.

Mike Gotta:

"There have been dozens of notable contributions from a variety of researchers, academics and practitioners across multiple disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, and mathematics):

1853, Auguste Comte (1798-1857): Comte applied structural terms to argue that people within a social system are interconnected, a concept core to much of the research that emerged in the 1930’s concerning social networks.

1908, Georg Simmel (1858-1918): Simmel offered a structural perspective on the association between individuals that include concepts related to “social circles”. These concepts were refined later by Charles Kadushin (1966) and by Douglas White (i.e., social circle network models).

1923, Jacob Levi Moreno, M.D. (1889-1974): Moreno is considered the father of sociometry, a term he coined in 1934. His study of social structures likely took shape in 1923. From 1932-1938, Moreno’s work crystallized, due largely to the influence of his research associates Helen Hall Jennings and Paul Lazersfeld. In a book published in 1934 (Who Shall Survive), Moreno described or alluded to many concepts that eventually defined social networks and their analysis.

1932: W. Loyd Warner (1898–1970): Warner’s involvement in two key research studies highlighted the need for structural analysis, graphical representation and analysis of social patterns to understand the influence of informal links, cliques and relationships. In one, the Yankee City project, Warner and his associates analyzed social stratification in a New England industrial town. In another, a project for Western Electric (1931-1932), Warner and his associates analyzed interactions and relationships across individuals in a bank wiring room.

1937 Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955): In a series of lectures that were not published until the late fifties, Radcliffe-Brown articulated concepts regarding how social relations linked and arranged people in social systems into certain orders. He is credited with as being an early spokesperson for the structural analysis of social networks.

1950, Alex Bavelas: Bavelas and his colleagues in the MIT Small Group Network laboratory at MIT, conducted research and a series of experiments that shaped concepts related to communication patterns (e.g., chain, wheel, star, all-channel and circle). He is also credited with originating concepts related to the role of centrality within a social network.

1958: Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen: Pool and Kochen undertook what is now considered pioneering research related to contact networks and the role of influence. Much of this research supported what later became referred to as the “small world” problem. These insights were documented in a manuscript Pool and Kochen authored and circulated for some time before formal publication in 1978.

1965 Harrison Colyar White: White is a highly regarded thought-leader in the field and perhaps represents the beginning of the more modern age of social network analysis. While at Harvard, White taught what has been considered a memorable course on social relations. Although the course was taught at the undergraduate level, concepts related to social networks had immense influence on students, many of which went on to be leaders in the field themselves.

1967: Stanley Milgram: Conducted the small world experiment which supported many of the concepts related to “six degrees of separation”, a term that became popularized in a game

1973: Mark Granovetter, published a seminal document that examine the influence of weak social linkages between people (“weak ties”).

1977: Barry Wellman, Wellman founded the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSA) which helped bring a fragmented collection of different disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, psychology, econommics, geography, computer science, education, mathematics and communications) into a more coherent field of study. Wellman also was well-known and respected for his own research which examined interpersonal networks and communities as social networks. His research contributions however have continued and he is widely regarded as a thought-leader today.


Heading from the seventies into the eighties, a transition into what might be called “modern-day” social network analysis, the field has continued to progress and mature as a respected field of study. Below are several important points articulated between the 1850’s and 1970’s that I considered worth calling out:


  • Society can be examined through structural connections between actors (e.g., people or other entities such as organizations and nation states)
  • Studying patterns of interaction within social structures can reveal a networks of relationships that join those actors
  • Actors are linked by a web of primary and secondary connections (e.g. strong and weak ties)
  • Relationship structures can be visually rendered (e.g., what was once referred to as a sociogram is now labeled a social graph)
  • Social structures influence diffusion of information
  • Certain actors can dominate communication networks (leading to concepts later referred to as “centrality”)
  • Social networks can include sub-groups (e.g., cliques, clusters, blocks)
  • Social structures are dynamic and continually go through stages of coupling and de-coupling as participants focus on particular activities
  • Although a network is comprised of relations between two actors, its overall essence can continue indefinitely (e.g., small world concept) "

(http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/04/analysis-of-soc.html)