Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Apples not falling far from the tree
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 12:20Will my daughter hate me for writing this? Will she be pleased? You never know with teenagers. However, I am hoping that she will be pleased. I’m pretty pleased with what she has written.
Mairead is working as a summer intern at Save the Children in their technology area. She has been ‘all marketing-coerced, and everything’ to put up a note on Facebook
to give all the stuck-up Seventy-Year-Old Muckity Mucks an idea of what they can do, as far as advertisements or recruiting or whatever, to get more people in the 18-25 type age bracket involved. Because, you know, we all have little siblings and stuff, we care about the child mortality rate too-- not just the thirty-year-old church-going mommies.
So if you are plugged into social media, stuff like Facebook, MySpace, text messaging on cellphones and all those things, and especially if you’re part of the 18-25 demographic, please stop by and take this survey. Tell all your friends. If we can get a lot of people to respond, Mairead says she’ll do a really awesome Happy Dance. It'll be better than the hamsters. Really”. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a video of it to put on YouTube.
And if you’ve got other ideas of how non-profits can reach out to the 18 to 25 demographic, add it as a comment, or send me an email. I’ll make sure Mairead gets it.
News of the Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/10/2007 - 14:52Slowly, surely, I’ve been making my way through the emails that have piled up. I’m currently at around 1450 unread emails. Some, I can delete quickly, others require responses or mention things that I’d like to talk about here on the blog. Currently, there are several topics that I’d like to explore in detail, but probably won’t get a chance to write about, so here are a few summaries.
Further explorations in the social media matrix
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/10/2007 - 11:28Yesterday, I spent a little more time surfing around blogs with tools like BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog and related sites.
I came up with a new graph of MyBlogLog connections. The style of observation has a great effect on the graph created, so let me take a few moments to talk about this graph.
MyBlogLog will be releasing an API at some point to allow better access to the underlying data. Because of this, I’ve hesitated to build some screen scrapers, but building graphs can be tedious, so I looked a little bit at the data that gets returned. I deconstructed some of the javascript and built a routine that retrieved data, stripped out the key data and threw it into a primitive database. At some point, I’ll come up with a better cleaner procedure. Since this is not using a clearly defined API, the data I’m getting back may have some inherent flaws in it.
Essentially, I retrieved the four most recent visitors to a MyBlogLog user, for each new user found, repeated the process. After I had gathered information on around 350 users, I consolidated the data. I kept only those users that had both incoming and outgoing links and had at least two links going one direction or the other. Even as is, this produced a pretty big graph. I will leave interpretations of the graph to the readers.
As I surfed around, I found that Goldy had written about a previous graph I had created and some of her thoughts about the blogging community she has found herself part of. There are some wonderful comments on that post talking about this sense of community.
I also visited Kevin Makice’s blog, BlogSchmog, where he asks, Where is the Informatics incubator? He notes the Techcrunch article about Yahoo! and Google both working on next generation social network tools.
Google has partnered with Carnegie Mellon to work on Socialstream. Yahoo! is working on mosh. There is some talk about how ‘mosh’ will relate to Yahoo! 360. What isn’t talked about is how MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! acquisition will relate.
What also isn’t talked about is how efforts to have an open social network, based on tools like XFN, FOAF and so on fit in. In many ways, Facebooks Apps seems to be moving us, slowly and surely towards open social networks. Already, there is a Facebook App for Upscoop which links together different closed social networks.
Yet much of this focuses on the technology of social networks and not the social aspects. Back in 2002, I tried to get a bunch of people thinking and talking about the social aspects of social networks. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of people on social networks at the time and I never found critical mass.
I set up a site called GroupMine. You can still find it on archive.org. I put up some general thoughts and initial notes. They continue to percolate in the back of my mind.
One of my recent thoughts has been about the relationship between Group Relations theory, al a Wilfred Bion, Tavistock, the A.K. Rice Institute, and later work like Social Dreaming and Gordon Lawrence, and online social networks. This came back to me yesterday when I received a friendship request on Facebook from a person who wrote about having been to a social dreaming matrix with me at the White Institute in New York City back in 2002. It turns out that, according to Facebook, we have several friends in common.
Will my graphs of MyBlogLog interactions, together with reconnecting with old friends and old thoughts about the social side of social networks lead to something interesting? I sure hope so. Perhaps we need to explore what a social media matrix really means.
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/05/2007 - 10:02Shortly, we will be heading off to Cape Cod for a few days. I don’t expect to be online during that time, so the blog won’t be updated, and most emails will probably go unanswered.
I dealing with the inspection for selling our house, I ended up climbing through some poison ivy, and I’m pretty miserable right now. Itching everywhere, unable to sleep. This, of course, means that Kim could sleep well either. It will be a difficult trip, but hopefully a little salt water will help out.
With the NOI campaigns, only the Burns campaign responded to my inquiries. Most, but not all of the campaigns list an email address somewhere to contact the campaign, and it appears as if most of those don’t bother to check their email. It seems to be a standard problem of many campaigns. The flood of emails can be overwhelming and many of them are spam or people wearing tin foil hats, but over the years, I’ve found some great volunteers and made some good friends as a result of responding to campaign emails. It gets to the idea of campaigns and emails really being a two-way conversation, and not just another broadcast medium.
On the graphing front, I have another graph of MyBlogLog interactions up on Flickr. It was during Wordless Wednesday and you can see the clear community grouping of Wordless Wednesday. It was also done early in the day and ends up showing a grouping of Malaysian bloggers.
Enough for now. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
A Digital Dunbar's Number
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/02/2007 - 23:24
Today, I started building up another map of connections in MyBlogLog. It rapidly got overwhelmingly large, but I’ll include it anyway. As I surfed blogs, I stumbled across a post by Steve Hays, aka Methodius on MyBlogLog where he wrote about the tempest concerning MyBlogLog community owners being able to send messages to everyone in their community.
Apparently Meg in Australia is getting spammed pretty badly with this. She’s currently in 906 communities, so it is less surprising that she’s getting a lot of messages. Another person who is in 5,480 communities also complained about this new feature.
Steve goes on to write some interesting thoughts.
I think "community" means that one desires to interact with others in the community. If people join communities on MyBlogLog and similar social networking sites, they ought to be interested in the topics of the community and in interaction with the members. If they do not want to communicate, they should not have joined the community in the first place.
I like Steve’s thought there. I’ve had serious problems with spammers in the past, and so I’ve made it more difficult for everyone to add comments to my blog, but this is to make it so that we can interact without the noise of spammers. It is to make it so that we can communicate more.
Steve goes on to say,
I have difficulty in understanding the motivation for joining a community where one has no interest in anything the community is about. If you join a football club, and have no interest in football, why did you join?
This is where I differ from him a little. Why join a community or a club that you have no interest in the subject matter? Well, for me, it would be to expand my horizons, to meet new people. Just because I’m not interested in football, doesn’t mean I can’t be interested in people that are interested in football. I’m not a stay at home mom, but I learn a lot from stay at home moms that are part of MyBlogLog. But I digress.
Steve ties it all together with the comment, “One of the problems of electronic networking is that it can lead to communication without community.” I think that sums it up nicely. Some people do “seem to join communities just to see how many they can collect”. Some of this might be for ego reasons, to have a large friends list. Some of it might be for some sort of search engine optimization or efforts to get people to click through to their sites, and make a profit from advertising.
In the comments, it got a bit heated, with one person going so far as to ask, “are you trying to run a cult or a community?”
There are two places I would like to go to explore this further. First, is to explore why people use MyBlogLog or other community sites in the first place. I touched on this a little bit as I discussed the idea of collecting communities. It seems like Steve, myself, and others, want to use MyBlogLog and other community sites, to find interesting people to communicate with. As I noted above, that does not necessarily mean that we have to have common interests. If anything, we would all be better off if we spent more time speaking with people outside of our normal community of interests.
For me, this ties back to Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”. I want to communicate in a meaningful personal way with people I encounter online. There are others who seek an “I and It” sort of relationship. The interest is in collecting links and clicks, either for ego strokes, to monetize them, or perhaps for some other reason. I’m interested in communicating with these people as well, but also, primarily, from the “I and Thou” framework.
The second idea that comes to mind is that of Dunbar’s number, “the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. This is typically set at 150, based on the size of the neocortex. However, it doesn’t take into consideration that when you are working online, you can page in and out sets of people, so while your neocortex may only be able to maintain stable relationships with 150 people at a time, using a good digital rolodex, that number can expand considerably.
This raises a new question. Is there a Digital Dunbar’s Number? A number at which point you start getting overwhelmed with spam or declaring email bankruptcy? I suspect there is, and that it is greater than 150, and perhaps less than 906 or at least less than 5,480, based on the recent discussion. How do we find this Digital Dunbar’s Number and what do we do when we reach it?
Are there other things that we can pick up from these large groups, some sort of collective unconsciousness that is gathered from the impact of all of this communication? These are ripe areas to explore.
