Did you see this (yesterday's --- May 4 --- NYT Sunday Magazine).
Is this ridiculous, or what?
Sure, it's a nice story line, but are we to believe that if you hang out with violent people you will become violent?
An amazing show at the Museum of Modern Art, in NYC --- Design and the Elastic Mind.
Many of the "exhibits" are network representations (including a few that I use in elementary lectures on network science). And the website showing them (since the exhibits are all digital) is amazing.
Check it out: Design and the Elastic Mind .
This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.
The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.
Interesting story in today's New York Times on how younger voters acquire news. This article highlights (1) the partial disintermediation of traditional media (e.g., because some content comes from sources like Youtube), (2) the increased power of the word-of-mouth second step in the classic two step model of diffusion afforded by e-mail/internet, and (3) how the medium facilitates grassroots mobilization. Excerpts:
According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.
....
A December survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press looked broadly at how media were being consumed this campaign. In the most striking finding, half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.
....
The way consumers filter their news is being highlighted now that a generation of Americans is coming of age in the midst of a campaign that has generated intense interest and voter involvement. Exit polls in 22 states estimate that more than three million voters under the age of 30 participated in Democratic primaries this year, up from about one million four years ago.
Very interesting piece in NYT last week on the decision by the US to dissolve the Iraqi Army in 2003. An excerpt:
Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.
Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.
“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”
In this election season, perhaps the hardest thing to evaluate about the candidates is one of the most important: how would she or he create a deliberative Presidency? We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our policies at home and abroad, and the next Presidency will be built brick by brick through the myriad of decisions that need to be made in response to the particular challenges that arise on a daily basis. Those decisions must reflect the President's vision of the world, but through the prism of the information and options that exist at particular instances in time. What does it take for the Presidency to successfully navigate the uncertainties of the 21st century?
Extensive research on individual and organizational decision making, including my own work on networks, highlights one prerequisite to high quality decisions: diversity of perspectives and sources of information. The modern Presidency is made up of a mix of careerists and transient political appointees in the Executive Office of the President, connected to relatively slow changing agencies. The key challenge is one of how to manage the connections among these individuals, in order to balance the simultaneous needs for deliberation and decision. Disagreement offers Presidents a menu of choices, where dissent can keep options open, and forces others to critically examine their own perspectives.
The successful President is one who can manage this complex network, creating a pull of information and viewpoints upwards. Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her study of Lincoln, presents a compelling portrait of a President who filled his cabinet with individuals with strong personalities and often conflicting views. In a rather different fashion, Franklin Roosevelt also structured his network so as to receive multiple perspectives, through privately soliciting information from rivals within the White House.
Recent Presidents have developed more institutionalized mechanisms to funnel information upwards. My colleague, Roger Porter, has documented the collegial, if sometimes adversarial, process of soliciting input from agencies regarding economic policy in the Ford administration. I have studied how the regulatory review processes instituted in the Reagan administration has offered the White House a steady stream of signals about regulatory policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Both of these processes took advantage of the natural differences of perspective that are embedded within the bureaucracy. These differences can be used to provide illumination as well as heat.
The President also needs to admit some degree of uncertainty as to the best course of action. No President, of course, has begun a speech "I am 51% certainty that I have made the best choice." But internal discussion must begin with an assumption of uncertainty and a respect for alternative points of view. That deliberative foundation must come from the President.
The general set of issues to balance is how distribute involvement in various decisions. Who has information, perspective, and expertise to contribute to a decision? How does one not clog the decision making network with issues of secondary importance so that the key decisions get the collective attention they deserve?
The history book has not yet closed on the current administration, but insider portrayals suggest a systematic mismanagement of the decision-making network. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi army is an example par excellence. This was one of the fundamental strategic decisions post invasion, and one where different bureaucratic actors had different things to contribute to the decision. Clearly, Bremer was in a privileged position vis a vis some of the information, but that did not mean that he was even the best person to process that information. Nation building generally, and rebuilding Iraq specifically was a domain that no one in the US government could claim such unique expertise as to require such deference. This case, and others like it, suggest a fundamental mis-management of the inter-agency process in foreign policy in the Bush Administration.
There is a potential trade-off of decisiveness and discipline on the one hand, and deliberativeness on the other. Clearly, the costs of dithering sometimes exceed the benefits of discussion. However, we face long run existential threats at home and abroad: with radical changes in the distribution of power in the world, and a restructuring of our economy at home. This next Presidency may well prove to be a pivotal one in history, and, to be successful, will require a network that supplies information and perspectives with which to choose the future.
There was a really interesting article in Rolling Stones on the Obama campaign, The Machinery of Hope (thanks go to Valdis Krebs to pointing it out to me). It highlights some of what I have discussed before-- the creation (top down) by the Obama campaign of an architecture to enable bottom up mobilization. Some excerpts, but I strongly recommend reading the entire article:
Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean —as well as social-networking and video tools that didn't even exist in 2004 — with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago.
…
The meeting in San Marcos wasn't advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as "MyBo" — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won't be micromanaged…. They'll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. To identify and mobilize Obama backers, they'll log on to the password-protected texasprecinctcaptains.com, download the phone numbers of targeted voters, make calls from their homes and upload the results to Austin headquarters. They'll also organize early-voting open houses — which will be publicized on MyBo — to boost turnout among core supporters. "Instead of hoping that your neighbors vote," Ukman tells them in an unintentional twist on the campaign's central theme, "you're going to take them to the polls."
…
Hildebrand actually flipped the equation, using the physical crowds Obama could draw to his rallies to bolster the campaign's e-mail list. In February and March of 2007, just after Obama announced his candidacy, the campaign set up huge rallies in cities from Los Angeles to Austin to Cleveland. In return for a ticket, supporters were asked only to provide their e-mail, zip code and telephone number
…
In Iowa, as many people under thirty caucused as did senior citizens. In every contest, the youth vote has at least doubled and often tripled previous records. Riemer is quick to point out that these successes aren't just the result of the campaign organizing young people but of young people organizing themselves.
Figueroa's goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves."
To turn well-meaning students and nurses and social workers into self-sufficient organizers, the campaign has put nearly 7,000 supporters through an intensive, four-day seminar known as "Camp Obama."
…
A strategy that leans so heavily on the grass roots is not without risk. In February, right-wing blogs had a field day when a Fox News affiliate ran footage of a volunteer office in Houston decorated with a Che Guevara flag.
There is a great piece in yesterday's New York Times (28 February) by Michelle Slatalla on using LinkedIn and similar network sites to actually make business connections. In Building a Web of Influence, she writes:
My problem could be networking. Or more specifically, a lack of it. I work in a basement where my only business contacts are my dogs, which appear unimpressed by my résumé. And on rare occasions when I venture aboveground to attend an event with the sort of people who should be only too willing to offer stock options in return for my grandmother’s chocolate cake recipe, I get tongue-tied. I blush.On the Internet, however, no one can tell you’re self-conscious. Business networking sites — from the five-year-old site LinkedIn.com to an upstart called NotchUp.com — attract members by stating that reluctant self-promoters like me can make contacts, and even get job interviews, fairly passively.
she goes on ....
Slowly, I began to see concrete signs of the value of passive networking. One day, a first-degree contact asked me to introduce her through LinkedIn to one of my other first-degree contacts, a writer at The New York Times who my friend thought might be interested in a book she wrote. She phoned soon after to say thank you; the writer had responded right away.A few days later, the same newspaper writer coincidentally forwarded an introduction to me from one of her first-degree contacts, a magazine editor looking for a humor writer.
Meanwhile, another first-degree contact told me her daughter had landed an interview after learning at LinkedIn that the interviewer and she went to the same college.
and concludes:
In my case, I’m too busy now to change jobs. But someday, after my dogs learn to turn doorknobs with their paws and my husband’s cough finally breaks up, I will be ready.I only hope that by then, the Exxon recruiter I see listed among my third-degree LinkedIn contacts will be searching for someone with expertise in “weekly allowance arbitration.”
It's a great piece. Take a look at it.
There is a very nice piece in today's Boston Globe on the role that technology has played in mobilizing support for Obama. There are snippets below, but I recommend reading the whole article.
There are a few key ingredients, it seems to me, to the strategy. First is the facilitation of the meeting of people with shared interests and goals. Second is creating a forum for people to express their views. Third is the provision of scripts and plans for the mobilization and coordination of action.
I should note that this is a combination of a bottom-up and top-down processes. This is not really like Meetup.com facilitating the rise of Howard Dean. The engineering of the site my.barackobama.com was designed to achieve certain, very specific, ends. It is notable that the Obama campaign developed its own proprietary platform rather than rely on existing platforms, such as Meetup and Facebook (although, Obama very much has a presence on those websites as well). This was, in part, for control reasons, I assume. The provision of those plans is also clearly a top down process. However, the actual use of these tools is totally bottom up, where the decisions of people to join the website are interdependent, enthusiasm breeding enthusiasm.
The success of the Obama campaign highlights one of the shortcomings of one of the dominant perspectives on political mobilization. Following from Mancur Olson's classic book, The Logic of Collective Action, it is a puzzle why people would contribute so much time and effort when, individually, their work is extremely unlikely to be decisive. This view of collective action is based on an assumption that the reason why people act is based on the impact their individual efforts will make to the collective endeavor. In fact, humans are social animals, and it is that combination of connection (with others) and cause that is so very powerful in politics and other domains (most notably, religion).
In the comments I would be interested in hearing the observations of others about the role of networks and technology in this political season.
In any case, the excerpts:
Technology aids Obama's outreach drive
Volunteers answer call on social networking site
More than any previous presidential campaign, Obama's effort is transforming politics with its use of technology. The astounding fund-raising figures are well documented - the campaign keeps a running tally on its website as it closes in on 1 million donors. But Obama's team has taken the use of the Internet to another level by allowing masses of volunteers to self-organize over the past year and communicate through their own social networking site, my.barackobama.com.
Created with help from Chris Hughes, one of three Harvard roommates who invented Facebook four years ago, MyBO, as campaign staffers call it, has about 500,000 members nationwide, a network of groups and individuals that the campaign ultimately harnesses for the old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts of electioneering – identifying supporters and getting them to vote in primaries and caucuses.
…
Clinton's campaign, relying more on traditional resources such as labor unions and elected officials, is also cobbling together an Ohio organization. Using its own e-mail list, the Clinton team recently received about 1,000 online replies statewide from people willing to help. The campaign was pleased with the response. The Obama camp, in contrast, drew 500 people from the Columbus area alone to the union hall of Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 189 on a Wednesday night in the middle of winter.
...
Valli Frausto, a 50-year-old mother of two from Columbus, was one of the first to open a MyBO account when Obama announced his candidacy a year ago. Several months earlier, she had seen Obama on Oprah Winfrey's show.
"I've never been involved in a political campaign before, but it was like a call to action for me," she said. "I said if he runs, I want to help, and with the way he put his campaign together, with all these tools available to us, it allowed me to get involved."
For the past year, Frausto estimates she has spent 20 hours a week as one of the administrators of Central Ohioans for Obama and a few others of the more than 300 groups established in Ohio through MyBO.
...
The groups have put out information tables at perhaps 20 festivals and fairs around Columbus, and held a 5-kilometer road race and other fund-raisers. They also hold debate parties, phone bank events, and happy hour gatherings to socialize, brainstorm, and introduce new members.
"It was all done through my.barackobama.com," Frausto said. "We would not exist if not for that tool. It's phenomenal to me."
…
Now, however, with the Ohio primary approaching, the campaign is much more actively coordinating the activists, most notably through phone banking. From a MyBO page, a member can click onto a list of 20 phone numbers with a series of prompts and scripts that the caller runs through, entering the responses of voters online. The information goes into the campaign database for its primary day get-out-the-vote operation.
From today's (2/19/08) NYT Science section ..... Large social networks may help surgical patients .... it appears that having a large network of friends and family may help you do better in surgical procedures (surprised?).
From a study published in the February 2008 issue of
Social Connectedness and Patient Recovery after Major Operations, one of the authors, Daniel B. Hinshaw, a professor of surgery at the University of Michigan , states:
"The average physician, when he takes a social history, asks about smoking and drugs and not the real social situation of the patient. And yet it looks like this is a real marker for problems".
Jennifer Chayes, of Microsoft Research (formerly in Math at UCLA) was just named director of a new Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge.
She is well-known to the Network Science crowd, doing good work in statistical physics. She also knows social networks. Good choice by Microsoft. Nice piece in yesterday's New York Times: Microsoft Adds Research Lab in East as Others Cut Back.
From the article:
The work she did in developing simple models of certain liquids and solids turned out to be useful in the study of random, self-engineered networks like the Internet. And some of Dr. Chayes’s insights into theoretical computer science have recently led to the development of some exceedingly fast networking algorithms.
It is notable, if not surprising, that the best place, in all of the Internet, to go for a sense of the direction that an election is going is intrade.com. Intrade is a futures market, where you can buy and sell contracts that pay off depending on the outcome of some event in the future. So, what has happened in the primaries is that that the futures market shows substantial shifts through the day of the event. Today is typical, where hours before poll closings, the market for the Republican race South Carolina swung hard toward McCain (who apparently is going to win).
What is interesting is that, as far as I can see, these markets swing before any other information is available on the Internet. That is, the market is being driven by those who presumably have a close connection to inside information—i.e. exit polls. This is not to say that employees of CNN are taking time off during the day to put money into intrade contracts, but that there is an informal leakage of information from those in the know, where that leakage then drives the market. That information can be misleading, of course (cf. Kerry, 2004); but the market allows for that possibility (e.g., even now Huckabee is trading at 2%).
This is an interesting natural experiment of sorts, because there those exit polls are likely by far the most reliable sources of information available regarding election outcomes (especially for primaries) before actual results come in. There are other bits of information that may be independently valuable, like any data on differential turnout across regions, etc, but generally the exit poll data are going to dominate everything else. It would therefore be interesting to calibrate the actual data that exit poll entities have gathered at what points in time (minute by minute) to see how quickly intrade responds. This should provide some sense of the speed of informational leakage from the exit polls. (And if you know of anyone has already done this, please post a comment.)
Btw, this graph shows the shift in the value of the McCain winning SC contract:
Note that the time marked is GMT, so the major shift occurred at around 6pm EST (exit polls were not released publicly until after 8pm).
Interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times that highlights the interplay of old and new ways of organizing, vis a vis the grassroots efforts for Governor Huckabee. A few notable points to highlight: (1) how the Internet facilitates bottom-up collective action in a way that would have been much more difficult a decade ago; (2) the emergent collective action builds on pre-existing evangelical networks; and (3) how the technology, in particular, potentially disintermediates the old guard leadership. That is, the old modality of collective action would have been more top down, reflecting the privileged informational position of the old guard, who had built up mailing lists and the like that enabled them to mobilize their constituencies. With the Internet, their constituencies can now find each other.
Excerpts from:
Huckabee Splits Young Evangelicals and Old Guard
WASHINGTON — Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.
The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign volunteers…
…
In Michigan, the Huckabee campaign had spent no money, hired no staff and had no office until last Wednesday, six days before the primary. But Gary Glenn, a conservative Christian advocate based in Midland, Mich., has been leading an informal effort to turn out evangelical voters. Some pollsters expect them to make up as much as 40 percent of the state’s primary voters this year.
Last week, Mr. Glenn lined up 50 local pastors to attend a closed-door breakfast with Mr. Huckabee in Grand Rapids. And he has compiled an e-mail list of more than 600 volunteers — many in Internet groups that Huck’s Army is connecting — who have been using church directories to make phone calls, courting local pastors and leafleting church parking lots .
“Recruit volunteers to stand this Sunday on public sidewalks across the street from the parking lots of the biggest evangelical churches you can find,” Mr. Glenn urged in a recent e-mail message.
….
[In South Carolina]… more than 500 people, many of them young evangelicals, have signed up for online Huckabee meet-up groups, said Christian Hine, 30, the state coordinator of the Huck’s Army effort. Unaided by the campaign, volunteers have borrowed church directories and bought their own phone lists to try to identify likely Huckabee voters, Mr. Hine said, and even paid to print their own Huckabee signs when the campaign ran out.
Let me make a few observations about the results tonight, based in part on the CNN entrance polls. First, the evangelical network beat the machine on the Republican side, with evangelical turnout making up about 60% of Republican voters, with Huckabee winning evangelicals decisively, and Romney winning non-evangelicals. Second, on the Democratic side (especially), turnout was the story, with a close to doubling of turnout from 2004. Particularly remarkable was the strong turnout of young voters—22% of those who turned out on the Democratic side were 17-29 (compare to 11% in Republican caucuses)—the same percentage as those 65 and over. Clinton decisively won those 45 and over (who still made up 60% of voters), but Obama just overwhelmed Clinton among those 45 and under.
In any case, the point here I make (casually) is that the individual decisions how to vote and whether to vote are not independent observations—that there is a pre-existing social organization (evangelicals in church, students in college)—which serves as the vessel for political action. I don’t claim this as a novel observation about politics, just one that is highlighted in these numbers.
Happy new year all! And for those political junkies out there, happy Iowa caucuses.
Has there been any work on the Iowa caucuses and social networks? There are a multitude of things one could study, notably around mobilization and caucusing choice. There has been more general work on networks and opinion (e.g., Huckfeldt, Sprague, etc), and networks and political mobilization (e.g., Nickerson).
Particularly interesting in 2008 is the contrast in mobilization strategy on the Republican side between Huckabee and Romney, where Romney has the traditional (well funded) mobilization machine, with phone calls, mass mailing, rides, etc; whereas Huckabee (out of necessity) is relying on informal evangelical networks to mobilize his supporters. Conventional wisdom is that the machine versus network match up will yield a several point edge to Romney.
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An interesting potential study: to examine the pre-caucus preferences (e.g., as measured by CNN entry poll) and post-caucus vote distribution.
Another potentially interesting study: examining the micro-level interactions within some of the caucuses.
In any case, if you know of relevant papers/research (or news about today's caucuses), please post as comment.
Another article in today’s New York Times evoked social network ideas, on the role of networks in Silicon Valley. (It is a sign of the times that I have blogged about three New York Times articles this week that were somehow about networks). This is a topic, of course that has received ample scholarly attention.
Some excerpts:
Yet a look at the microclusters within Silicon Valley demonstrates the business relationships, the social connections and the seamless communication that animate the region’s economy. It also suggests the human nuance behind the Valley’s success and shows why that success is not easy to copy, export or outsource.
Then there are the clusters that are based more on personal connections or affiliations than on geography. Stanford, just outside Palo Alto, is perhaps the strongest cluster-generator in the Valley.
Stanford students and staff have been behind countless companies in the Valley, from established ones like Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and Sun Microsystems to more recent success stories like Google and VMware.
New companies with deep ethnic links — mainly Indian and Chinese — are sprouting up in the Valley. Often, ethnic background is but one layer of social relationship. SnapTell, a start-up that seeks to marry image-recognition technology, cellphones and marketing, was founded last year by G. D. Ramkumar and Gautam Bhargava, Indian computer scientists and Valley veterans. The company has 10 employees, six of whom have Ph.D.’s and three of whom are from Stanford.
The shared backgrounds, interests and schools make for frictionless communication that fosters rapid innovation.
Even weekend sports, it seems, become the basis for informal business clusters in the Valley. Start-up ideas or job opportunities often surface on the sidelines of a weekend soccer game or, increasingly, cricket match. Giriraj Vengurlekar, an engineer who lives in Sunnyvale, plays in one of the Valley’s cricket leagues, which now has 40 teams. His team, the Centurions, includes employees of Sun Microsystems, eBay, Cisco, Yahoo and other technology companies.
Last year, Mr. Vengurlekar joined Serus, a start-up that makes software for managing offshore manufacturing operations. The cricket pitch, he finds, is a good place to scout recruits or learn of job openings. “People don’t play cricket to get jobs, but it definitely happens,” he said. “Cricket definitely spills over into business.”
I would note that you never play cricket alone.
It is not surprising that identity and background play a key role in silicon valley networks. The statement The shared backgrounds, interests and schools make for frictionless communication that fosters rapid innovation., in particular caught my eye. The potential downside, one would think, is that these homogeneous clusters do not foster the innovation that is the result of different, complementary, backgrounds; of the recombination of existing ways of thinking (cf Reagans and Zuckerman 2001 on the role of diversity on teams).
Ray Reagans, Ezra W. Zuckerman, Networks, Diversity, and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams, ORGANIZATION SCIENCE, Vol. 12, No. 4, July-August 2001, pp. 502-517
Interesting article in New York Times last Sunday on spread of use of performance-enhancing substances. The punchline:
Mitchell’s report contended that the use of performance-enhancing substances was spread not by stars, but by journeymen like Segui.
The report described how as Segui traveled, he put teammates in touch with Radomski, who as a former Mets clubhouse employee was viewed as an insider. Frequently, the referrals to Radomski as depicted in the report were to marginal or injured players trying to keep their jobs.
There was a neat graphic illustrating the role that Segui played in the spreading process. This is reminiscent of studies out there examining the early spread of HIV. In short, journeymen play a key bridging role in the system in disseminating information. It would be interesting to plot average degree of a player (as measured by number of teammates over the years) and probability of being named in Mitchell report, as well as the probability of being a conduit for the spread of usage more generally.
Have there been studies that have looked at player "networks" (based on who has been teammates with whom)? I guess this is formally similar to the work that Uzzi and collaborators have done on Broadway productions; one could easily produce the same kind of graphs for any sport. Not sure there are interesting questions that one could answer with data like these, but perhaps.... I wonder what role such bridges may have played, for example, in the emergence and effectiveness of unions in sports?
Apropos computational social science, there have been a couple of articles on using facebook for social science research, one on Sunday in the Washington Post, and one on Monday (front page) in the New York Times.
An excerpt from the New York Times article:
To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.
“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
In other words, Facebook — where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another — is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.
“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.” [emphasis mine]
Facebook is an example par excellence of the emergent media that facilitate communication, but also leave a wonderful record for researchers to mine. The interesting question is how to design research so as to pull apart exactly the causal conundrum Kaufman mentions (the coevolution problem I have written about). How does one pull apart shared histories (which may be correlated with the network) from diffusion, for example? Observing, for example, things diffuse through facebook does not tell us, necessarily, that it is the network driving that diffusion, because there may be shared exposure to things like marketing. In any case, the facebook offers new vistas in terms of pulling these things apart.
by David Allen
The Financial Times recently reported on the rise of bullying - and hate mongering - as web counterparts to 'positive' social networking. As a sample, the story's sidebar describes three 'counter' sites:
Enemybook_Goes under the strap line "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer". Set up as a riposte to the perceived bogus nature of many online friendships, Enemybook runs off the back of Facebook. It allows you to add people as Facebook enemies below your friends, specify why they are enemies and notify them that they are enemies. You can also see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with the enemies of your enemies.
Snubster_Similarly to Enemybook, Snubster derides the notion of social networking sites, and can run off Facebook. Users can build lists of personal enemies from their Facebook contacts, who will then be sent a snub and will be alerted that they are either "On notice"
or "Dead to me".
Hatebook_Modelled on the Facebook concept, and with an almost identical layout, Hatebook offers a less friendly approach to the world of social networking. You can befriend "Other haters", and your homepage alerts you when "Other fricking idiots" contact you. The site also provides you with an "Evil Map", marking the locations of other users. The antithesis to Facebook's emphasis on making friends, this is an open forum for abuse and aggression.
Nature had news article and an accompanying editorial in its most recent issue on the issues around privacy in the developing field of computational social science. These pieces do a nice job of highlighting the need to develop a powerful institutional infrastructure to facilitate the growth of computational social science. If I were to point to one place where this burgeoning field, which has enormous potential to do good, could trip up, it would be in dealing with privacy. The key challenges are balancing the need for privacy of the data of individuals, with the benefits of improved knowledge about human behavior. This balance is manageable, but requires a lot of work by social and computer scientists, as well as the existing self-regulatory systems of the research world (e.g., IRB's). Something that I will write about in the future, but below are excerpts from the article and editorial.
Excerpts from news article:
The hottest growth area in the field [of social science] is computational social science. This is often based on privileged access to electronic data sets such as e-mail records, mobile-phone call logs and web-search histories of millions of individuals. Such studies are ushering in a revolution in the social sciences, specialists say. But there is a trade-off between the scientific interest in working with such data and concerns about privacy. “It’s a huge issue,” says David Lazer, a researcher at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
...
This work [referring to work by Jon Kleinberg that illustrates the potential to "de-anonymize" network data] reinforces the need for a systematic, institutional approach to improving the privacy rights of those whose data are used, says [Marshall] Van Alstyne [of Boston University]. That echoes the conclusions of a May study by the US National Academies, which said that safeguarding privacy cannot safely be left to individual researchers. It stated that: “Institutional solutions involve establishing tiers of risk and access, and developing data-sharing protocols that match the level of access to the risks and benefits of the planned research.” But [Myron] Gutmann [of the University of Michigan and co-author of the study] and other social scientists also stress that the risks should be kept in perspective. Scientists must meet strict rules on any research on human subjects. In contrast, private firms are largely free from such constraints, and already have wide latitude to snoop on, and data mine, their employees’ work habits.
Excerpts from editorial:
For a certain sort of social scientist, the traffic patterns of millions of e-mails look like manna from heaven. Such data sets allow them to map formal and informal networks and pecking orders, to see how interactions affect an organization's function, and to watch these elements evolve over time. They are emblematic of the vast amounts of structured information opening up new ways to study communities and societies. Such research could provide much-needed insight into some of the most pressing issues of our day, from the functioning of religious fundamentalism to the way behaviour influences epidemics....
But for such research to flourish, it must engender that which it seeks to describe. And so it is encouraging that computational social scientists are trying to anticipate threats to trust that are implicit in their work. Any data on human subjects inevitably raise privacy issues (see page 644), and the real risks of abuse of such data are difficult to quantify. But although the risks posed by researchers seem far lower than those posed by governments, private companies and criminals, their soul-searching is justified. Abuse or sloppiness could do untold damage to the emerging field.
There has been a spate of stories (also this story from globe) recently about the use of cell phones to track the locations of your friends. There has also been some talk of linking data from the social networking sites to cell phones, so, for example, you could walk into a room and instantly find someone who you had never met, but who was a friend of a friend (through facebook or some other database that was stored in the phone).
These are clever ideas, but let me throw out another idea: a program for phones that facilitates those “you grew up in Long Island? Did you know John Smith, by any chance?” moments. (A small digression—this exact question (except for the name) was posed to me once. And, surprisingly, I actually did know the person in that case.)
The basic idea is quite simple—if you are talking to someone, and you both have the program, have the phones link via Bluetooth and:
1) find overlapping phone numbers and report them back. A more extensive version of this would also match any incoming or outcoming calls the phones have ever made.
2) collect and match structured data about the owners of the phones—where and when you went to school, where you’ve lived different years, etc., and report back matches. This is all of that information that people initially exchange when they meet. While no substitute, this could be faster and more thorough way to those “Do you know” questions. That is, you would both instantly find out if you both happened to live in Ann Arbor for the same two years in the 1990s.
This would not be a hard program to write, but there is the classic chicken-egg problem of how to get enough people to sign on to make it work. Not my problem—but if you write such a program, let me know.
While the baby boomers are slowly taking to online networking (see my earlier post here), some youngsters should probably do a little less of it.
Apparently too much use of Facebook does not have a positive effect on "real-life" (or traditional) networking. An article by Michael Schulman in this week's edition of the New Yorker talks about an NYU freshman seminar entitled "Facebook in the Flesh". The aim of the seminar, part of a series of seminars during freshman orientation, was to re-introduce the Facebook generation to face-to-face meetings. Participants were given a few questions ("What drew you to NYU?") they had to ask each other in pairs. This excerpt from the article nicely summarizes the outcome:
"[The facilitator] blew a whistle. 'Thoughts? Feelings? Reactions?' he said. 'Was it hard?' 'Harder than Facebook,' one girl said."
Some food for thought.
An article in today's New York Times discusses the emergence and popularity of social networking sites aimed at the 55+ population. Very interesting, I thought, in particular the hypothesis that while these sites might take longer than myspace or facebook to reach high levels of usage, baby boomers are likely to "hang around". This resonates well with investors...read the full article below.
The Graying of the Web
By MATT RICHTEL
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 11 — Older people are sticky.
That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.
The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook — with wrinkles.
And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next.
“Teens are tire kickers — they hang around, cost you money and then leave,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog “Infectious Greed.” Where Friendster was once the hot spot, Facebook and MySpace now draw the crowds of young people online.
“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.”
This prospective and relative stickiness is helping drive a wave of new investment into boomer and older-oriented social networking sites that offer like-minded (and like-aged) individuals discussion and dating forums, photo-sharing, news and commentary, and chatter about diet, fitness and health care.
Continue reading ""Older people are sticky" - social sites for baby boomers" »
I’ve blogged in the past about the fund raising networks underlying the campaign. Well, one of my students last term, Katie Selenski, did a nice paper examining the pattern of campaign contributions to Giuliani, Obama, and Clinton. She examined contribution patterns as two mode (contributor x candidate) data. In particular, who maxed out in contributing to at least two of those three candidates? 344 individuals fell into that category in the first quarter of this year (clearly people with more money to spare than I do). To give a flavor, below is a list of California Obama-Clinton hedgers (88 in all).
While there are some big name entertainers on the list (see Streisand, Spielberg, Manilow, etc), there is a remarkable number of top executives (big circles)—although we don’t know how this compares to nonhedgers. One suspects that for top executives there is a particular instrumental value to these contributions, which is why we would see so many.
Below is the picture of hedgers nationally.
Again, there are a large number of top executives. And, unsurprisingly, there are more Clinton-Obama hedgers than Giuliani-Obama or Giuliani-Clinton. But there are still a remarkable number of folks in the latter two categories. Some interesting patterns: there are more attorneys who do a Clinton-Giulianai hedge than Obama-Giuliani, and more people from finance who go the Obama-Giuliani path. Presumably this reflects the underlying social structure of campaign contributions—e.g., one imagines that many individuals are recruited to contribute by associates, and may have associates who belong to different candidate camps.
In any case, these are nice illustrations of the potential power of these data. I have seen a fair amount of news reporting based on these data—would be interested in postings on academic or professional (i.e., campaign fundraising) uses of these data.
Interesting article in the NYT this morning: it seems as if the business strategies of cellphone networks have an impact on social networks. People who are in the same network talk more to each other, than people who don't have the same cellphone network.
The article explains how in informal friendship networks the frequency and duration of cellphone calls is lowered as soon as one of the participants switches to another network and that business acquaintances become "friends" through longer and more frequent phone calls when they are in the same cellphone network.
They refer to research on cellphone use being conducted at the Universities of Notre Dame and Michigan. I am wondering if people here at the Media Lab have found out a similar connection: a question for our bloggers Ben and David.
I had not thought about my own personal cellphone usage in this way, mainly because I am not checking how many minutes I have left. From a research standpoint, is your cellphone network/provider really powerful enough to influence the duration and frequency of interactions with people you do not consider your friends and only talk to on purely professional topics?
Interesting article in today's Boston Globe on the development of Web 2.0 style tools to be used within organizations. The first two paragraphs:
If vendors have their way, a second wave of collaborative technologies -- including wikis, blogs, videos, and mashups, platforms and features borrowed from social-networking sites like MySpace -- soon will wash onto computers in the workplace.
Such interactive technologies are part of a larger trend known as Web 2.0 that has taken root in the consumer space. They have the potential to transform commerce, simplifying communications between employees, suppliers, and customers, speakers told business and information technology professionals at the Enterprise 2.0 conference at Boston's Westin Waterfront hotel last week.
---
It's an interesting question how transformational these kinds of tools could be within an organization. Organizations, obviously, have other mechanisms for information sharing and community building, and thus there may not be the same type of vacuum that one sees in other settings. Further, many of the barriers to information sharing many be institutional and not technical (actually, I am doing some research on this with fellow bloggers Ines Mergel and Maria Binz Scharf). But I do suspect that there will be some cases where these tools could align pretty well with an organization; the trick will be to identify the appropriate settings.
Interesting NBER paper discussed in today’s NYT, by Laren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini, and Christopher Malloy. The gist of it: that investments by mutual funds are more likely in companies in which the manager of a fund has classmates on the board of directors, and, further, the returns on those investments are far higher than investments in which the manager does not have “old school ties.” Further, the timing of these investments is tied to particular news events from the corporation, suggestion some “information transfer” is occurring.
This is both a neat bit of research, which makes a persuasive case for the presence of information transfer. The magnitude of the effect is particularly striking when you consider that their proxies for a social network, while reasonable, are certainly noisy. That is, while attending the same school, especially in the same cohort, is certainly strongly predictive of a relationship, people do not have relationships with all of their classmates, and have many/most of their relationships with non-classmates. So this effect (almost double the return for investments associated with ties as compared to those not) is likely a fairly conservative estimate of the impact of social ties.
I would also note that this paper is also illustrative of entry of social network ideas into economics (generally by a new cohort of scholars), as well as (to revisit my earlier discussions about computational social science) the potential to mine the growing mountains of relational data that now exist in various archives.
It will be interesting to observe the impact of Fred Thompson’s incipient entry into the race for the Republican nomination. One part of the story will be the competition for voters. Another will be the competition for dollars. Per earlier entries on the election, a key to mobilizing resources for a run at the Presidency is the network of big money donors. Interestingly, the competition should be particularly brutal among candidates who are in a similar position (“structurally equivalent”) in the fundraising network. If candidates A and B both are friends with C, then A and B are in competition for C’s dollars. The empirical question, in Thompson’s case, is who is he most structurally equivalent to. My naïve guess is that among the big three, McCain would be, with both drawing on a conservative Washington financial base. Giuliani and Romney likely both have fairly structurally distinct financial foundations. In any case, we should be able to tell more by looking at the second quarter financial reports. It also would be interesting to examine who has contributed to more than one candidate, and which candidates tend to draw from the same part of the network.
The New York Hall of Science is the host of the 2007 NetSci conference and has also an ongoing exhibition on social networks. It shows kids hands on how social networks are established or fall apart.
It’s a very cool exhibition: the creator Stephen Uzzo has just walked us through it without explaining the different parts. Everyone had to experience for themselves how connections on the Internet are created for example, how a hub connects to the closest spokes around him (we were all standing on a light show type of board, where each of us was a node and when you move around the connections are changing, depending on the shortest path). There were also real spiders creating a spider web.
I will add more on this during the conference and hopefully some pictures...
Notable news in the world of social network research, that Duncan Watts is being hired away from Columbia University by Yahoo.
Duncan Watts, by the by, is a two time speaker on the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks, and, of course, the Watts of Watts and Strogatz (1998), which marked the beginning of the current era of research on networks by physicists, mathematicians, and the like.
I am not sure what were the key factors in this move, but it is surely notable that one of the "rock stars" of the field is leaving academia. Three obvious potential factors are: (1) the substantial availability of resources in the private sector in this area at this time; (2) the access to proprietary data; and (3) an institutional milieu (at least at Yahoo and Google) more encouraging of cross-boundary innovation than much of academia.
Is this a blip or a wake up call to the academy? I will revisit in a year or so....
D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks, Nature, 393:440-442 (1998).
This story (excerpts below) has a nice, recursive, quality.
Social network website reaches a hire level
LinkedIn uses its own who-knows-whom tools to recruit a CEO.
By Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
May 7, 2007
Dan Nye landed a job as chief executive of a hot Silicon Valley company without even dusting off his resume.
....
Nye was an executive vice president at Advent Software Inc. when Reid Hoffman, chairman of social-networking company LinkedIn Corp., came calling. Hoffman hadn't found him through a headhunter or a classifieds site but through LinkedIn's vast who-knows-whom online network.
,,,
Hoffman had been looking for someone to run the Palo Alto company he founded, which is like MySpace.com for professionals — people can fill out profile pages, then connect for sales leads, expertise or job prospects. A venture capitalist he knew recommended Nye.
...
Not until after he was hired did Nye discover that Hoffman had made dozens of reference checks — without asking Nye for a single name. He found them through LinkedIn.
All Hoffman had needed were the names of the companies where Nye had worked and the years he was there. Hoffman ran that information through LinkedIn's member profiles, finding dozens of people who had overlapped with the prospective hire (members can also search by college attended and by job title). He fired off e-mails and phone calls to numerous people and talked extensively with 27 of Nye's former colleagues.
...
As he weighed the job, Nye turned the tables on his recruiters. He studied up on LinkedIn through its own online tools.
"I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be part of this company," he said.
...
"We now live in a world where it's just not hard to find out about people," [Nye] said.
Interesting article in today's Boston Globe about the competition for dollars between Obama and Clinton in Massachusetts. Of particular relevance to this blog is the following quote:
"You don't give to causes, you give to friends," said mystery writer Robert Parker of Cambridge, who contributed $4,600 to Obama. "Larry Tribe asked me to contribute to Obama, and so I did." But Parker added that while he would like to see Obama win the nomination, "I'm not an enthusiastic political supporter of anyone."
This highlights the fact that contributions are, in part, mobilized through social networks of like-minded people. It would be interesting to examine the contribution data as 2-mode network data (candidates x contributors) to see (1) how contributors are connected; and (2) how candidates over time are linked to each other through their contributors.
FYI, this Sunday at 7pm CBS 60 Minutes will air a story, "A Not So Perfect Match" on familial searching of DNA databases. Familial searching, as I discussed last May on this blog, is the search of DNA databases for near misses that might be indicative of a family relationship between a known sample in a database and an unknown sample from a crime scene. This story is in part based on a paper of mine (along with collaborators Frederick Bieber and Charles Brenner) in Science that examined the feasibility of using kinship analysis to accurately identify family relationships in a very large database. Our conclusion: familial searching is quite practical to do, and would produce many new leads. The aggressive use of familial searching, however, raises a variety of policy, ethical and policy issues....
A broader point relevant to this blog are all of the data that are collected out there that are essentially relational, and how that information might be used. Further, to the extent that data have a relational dimension (i.e., information about me might provide insight about others I am connected to), individual-based protocols for consent might be problematic-- because third parties that might be affected are not asked for consent.
In any case, this story will be posted on the CBS News website in its entirety by Sunday evening in case you don't catch it when it airs.
Feel free to post reactions to the story here.
_________________________________________
Frederick Bieber, Charles Brenner, David Lazer, “Finding Criminals Through DNA of Their Relatives,” Published Online May 11, 2006, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1122655, 2006.
One sign that the whole network idea may have gone a bit too far: when I was flipping around the channels last night was one with the header: “Jesus networked with people from varied backgrounds”.
Alex's recent post on Dark Networks started me thinking about how and why network structures evolve. This turned into a conversation with my friend and colleague Jon Lindsey, a PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT and an intelligence officer in the Navy soon to deploy in Iraq. He suggested that the network form is actual quite fragile with respect to organizational forces: given the opportunity, many of these organizations will grow quite hierarchical with the standard bureaucracies we would expect to see else where.
Sure enough, from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point comes a project called "Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities". The full report (116 pp, pdf) makes for an interesting read, but I am fascinated by the translated original sources that are included. I was particularly drawn to the Al-Qaeda employment contract, with details as mundane as:
The bachelor Mujahed qualifies for a round trip ticket to his country after one year from
joining the organization. He can take a one month vacation. He doesn't get reimbursed if
the ticket is not used, but he has the right to change it to a ticket to perform
the pilgrimage. This period starts from the date of joining AL-QAEDA.The married Mujahed and his family qualify for round trip tickets to their country of origin
after two years, and one month vacation. Tickets can not be reimbursed if unused.
This seems as bureaucratic as any employment agreement that I've signed, with the exception of the organizational goals. This document was discovered in Afghanistan, where the the administration of the organization appears to have become more mundane that the "4th Generation warfare" theory might suggest. Absent the constraints of a hostile, ubiquitous surveillance and law enforcement state, Al Qaeda starts to look a little like The Office.
At the same time, the demand for a network analysis approach for understanding and combating terrorism might be coming even more important. The Washington Post reports that
With new plots surfacing every month, police across Europe are arresting significant numbers of women, teenagers, white-skinned suspects and people baptized as Christians -- groups that in the past were considered among the least likely to embrace Islamic radicalism.The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.
Absent the ability to use profiling to detect targets of interest, the type of data that the NSA was accused of collecting (albeit illegally) might be very useful for prevention and threat containment.
German researchers recently published an in depth analysis of the RAF, Germany’s terror group of the 1970s. While this topic has been studied well in the past, their work allows for deeper insights into the RAF’s international network. Apparently, the RAF was well connected to other European and Palestinian terrorist groups. They shared stolen weapons, received training in the Middle East or gained access to safe zones. For example, a hand grenade stolen by the RAF in a raid on a German based US Army depot was later used by Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist. Cooperating Palestinian groups were even secretly supplied by the KGB officially endorsed by Breschnew, the former chairman of the communist party. Despite that, from ideological point of view RAF’s cooperation with the Palestinians was somewhat paradox as the RAF justified their actions with antifascism or members called for sympathy/support of the "left" with Israel in the Six-Day war.
Unfortunately, the two volumes called “Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus (The RAF and the left wing terrorism)” by Kraushaar (Ed.) are only available in German at the moment.
See excerpts on New York Times story on disappearance of Microsoft researcher James Gray. This is a remarkable illustration of social capital—the social capital story underpinnings are: (a) that Gray had many ties; (b) these ties were to people who control important resources; (c) that these relationships were strong enough to mobilize these individuals; (d) that their network of relationships enabled effective collective action, and (e) the role that technology has played in allowing a bottom up, distributed, effort in the search.
On this last point, check out/ or even help look for James Gray, by going to the Amazon Mechanical Turk. AMT is a tool to allow distributed work on very large projects. From the website:
“During the last 5 days, Mechanical Turk workers looked at more than 560,000 images from 3 satellites, covering nearly 3,500 square miles of ocean. A group of experts is currently reviewing the images that workers identified, and sending their results to the appropriate authorities.”
My best wishes to Dr. Gray and, to his friends and family in their efforts to find him.
DL
____________________________________
To see full NYT article .
February 3, 2007
Silicon Valley’s High-Tech Hunt for Colleague
By KATIE HAFNER
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 — When James Gray failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday night, Silicon Valley’s best and brightest went out to help find him. After all, Dr. Gray, 63, a Microsoft researcher, is one of their own. The United States Coast Guard, which started a search Sunday night, suspended it on Thursday, after sending aircraft and boats to scour 132,000 square miles of ocean, stretching from the Channel Islands in Southern California to the Oregon border...
Continue reading "Strong ties are those that look for you…" »
Dan Novak from IBM posted about an article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal on the SOCNET list. Since this is something I'm personally very interested in, I thought I'd share the posting with this community, with more to come from yours truly about SN in healthcare...
Quoting Dan Novak:
"Social networking to help patients and improve healthcare in today's Wall Street Journal (12/27/06).
My company has been supporting Patient Centric Networks (PCN), primarily from an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) point of view.
"Patient Social Networks" have the potential to educate, provide support, contribute to research, improve healthcare, and save lives.
Full article requires subscription, here is the free preview"
Recently we heard more and more that online social networking platforms don’t really work - Alexa teaches us, that people tend to sign up for MySpace, Facebook or openBC, but platform providers have the hardest time to keep the network alive: people tend to sign up, but don’t or only infrequently come back to their profile.
This made my co-author Thomas Langenberg, EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, and me start to think about the question: What makes online ties sustainable? We came up with a research design that looks at four different phases of a life cycle of online ties.
Here is the abstract of our paper:
Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a study about the number of social relations people maintain online and the omnipresent question was raised again: are actual face-toface contacts declining over time and are they replaced by online social interactions. Our virtual life is scattered in online profiles across sites such as openBC.com, Friendster.com, Match.com or MySpace.com. There are currently more than 400 different online social networking sites – with new sites popping up every day. Building on existing factors of persistence and sustainability of network ties in general, we address the key research questions: Which factors lead to the creation, maintenance, decay and reconnection of online network ties? Our research draws on prominent issues in the social network literature, which address the gap between research on offline and online social networks. We examine individual, dyadic, structural and content-related characteristics to understand how and why actors in different phases of their life cycle turn to online ties. Within the presented research framework, we derive propositions and develop a research design to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative network data. The overall goal is to develop recommendations on how online social networks can become sustainable over time, and we develop questions and avenues for further research.
We came up with the following taxonomy of online vs. offline networks in our paper:
Full citation:
Mergel, I./Langenberg, T. (2006): What makes online ties sustainable? A Research Design Proposal to Analyze Online Social Networks, PNG Working paper No. PNG06-002, Cambridge.
Interesting piece in Sunday's NYT Magazine on the potential for collaborative web-type tools to help the US intelligence community to "connect the dots". The essential conundrum, as highlighted in earlier postings, is how to facilitate the critical information sharing within the community, and not to allow it to seap out in damaging ways. Not clear that there is a way to achieve both.
Open-Source Spying
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006
(New York Times Magazine)
When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.
But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. “The reality,” he later wrote ruefully, “was a colossal letdown.” ...
A post script on the election: Over the last couple of decades there has been a lot written on the emerging “Republican majority.” The 2006 election, providing majorities to Democrats in both houses in Congress, seemingly belies this assertion. However, it is only one election, with results in part a referendum on an unpopular President, and in part a referendum on a poorly run Republican Congress. Neither changes the basic tectonics of American politics, so it is worth revisiting the Republican majority thesis.
In part, these assertions rest on geography (red states are generally growing in population faster than blue states), and in part on demography (red voters growing faster as share of electorate than blue voters).
The argument about geography rests on the fast growth rates of the (red) South and West, and the slow growth rates of (blue) Northeast. These divergent growth rates have to be driven by some combination of migration and divergent fertility/mortality. (These growth rates over the short run have to be primarily the former, although for interesting piece on the fertility component, which argues that conservatives have more children and thus will inherit the body politic. I think the argument in the final paragraph, however, trumps this fertility analysis). To the extent that the growth rates are driven by intra-US migration, the question is what happens when blue staters move into a red state. There are two possibilities: (1) the blue staters are socialized into the ways of their adopted state; or (2) the politics of their adopted state shifts incrementally toward a shade of purple.
I have not seen a definitive study of this issue (please post a comment if you have); however, the election of Webb (and Kaine in 2005) in Virginia offers an intriguing hint. Northern Virginia, in the orbit of Washington DC, is home to many transplanted blue staters, and is a nice laboratory to examine the social persuasion effects of a red state on these blue staters. The electoral results in 2005 and 2006, where Northern Virginia provided Webb and Kaine their margins of victory, suggests that the migrants to red states, rather than taking on reddish hues, may be coloring their adopted states blue.
Of course, Northern Virginia has some particular characteristics—e.g., many of its residents work in Washington DC, and thus may be predisposed to be more pro-government. Further, migrants to Virginia have clustered in Northern Virginia, rather than scattering randomly through Virginia, perhaps allowing them to escape the social pressures to conform. However, such clustering is typical; further, it is interesting to see that the Rocky Mountain West, long the bedrock of the Republican pa