Transcript PowerPoint - ucsc.edu) and Media Services

social networks / social software
fdm 20c introduction to digital media
lecture 16.05.2007
warren sack / film & digital media department / university of california, santa cruz
last time
• surveillance
outline for today
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social networks as science
social networks as technology
social networks as popular culture
social networks as art
social networks as science: field
• social network analysis is an interdisciplinary
social science, but has been of especial
concern to sociologists;
• recently, physicists and mathematicians have
made large contributions to understanding
networks in general (as graphs) and thus
contributed to an understanding of social
networks too.
social network as science: definition
• [Social network analysis] is grounded in the
observation that social actors [i.e., people] are
interdependent and that the links [i.e.,
relationships] among them have important
consequences for every individual [and for all of
the individuals together]. ... [Relationships]
provide individuals with opportunities and, at the
same time, potential constraints on their
behavior. ... Social network analysis involves
theorizing, model building and empirical
research focused on uncovering the patterning
of links among actors. It is concerned also with
uncovering the antecedents and consequences
of recurrent patterns. (from Linton C. Freeman)
social network as science: history
J.L. Moreno (1934) Friendship choices between
4th grade boys (triangles) and girls (circles)
social networks as science: history
kinship studies: Radcliffe-Brown, Levi-Strauss, etc.
(see Jeff Tobin, faculty.oxy.edu/tobin/anth100/ outlines/05.html)
social networks as science: history
(see Jeff Tobin, faculty.oxy.edu/tobin/anth100/ outlines/05.html)
social networks as science: history
• Stanley Milgram (1967) “The Small World
Problem,” Psychology Today
• Milgram sent 60 letters to various recruits in
Wichita, Kansas who were asked to forward the
letter to the wife of a divinity student living at a
specified location in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The particpants could only pass the letters (by
hand) to personal acquaintances who they
thought might be able to reach the target whether directly or via a "friend of a friend".
• “six-degrees of separation”
social networks as science: history
• Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties”
• Sometimes acquaintances are more valuable
than friends (e.g., when one is looking for a job).
social networks as science: equivalence
A
B
A and B are “structurally equivalent”
because they connect to the same people
and thus have equivalent
positions in the network.
social networks as science: centrality
Diane is central; Jane is not.
See www.orgnet.com/sna.html
social networks as science: bridges
if you’re a boy in this network (a triangle)
and you want to meet a girl (a circle),
who are you going to call for an introduction?
social networks as science: bridges
this guy, right?
social networks as science: social capital
• if you connect separate networks you have
bridging capital
• if you are central to a network you have
bonding capital
social networks as science: bowling alone
• sociologist robert putnam claims that united
states citizens no longer know or trust their
neighbors and thus communities have lost their
social capital
• when did we start to lose it? after the second
world war
• what media technology came into wide-spread
use after the second world war?
social networks as technology
• email, newsgroups, and weblogs, facebook,
friendster, flickr and other forms of “social
software”
• in the design of the arpanet (the forerunner to
the internet) email was an afterthought!
social networks as technology
• search engines: e.g., Google (http://google.com)
– Google’s Page Rank algorithm gives more weight to
popular webpages.
– A webpage is considered popular if many other
webpages link to it.
• compare this to search engines built specially
for weblogs; e.g., Cameron Marlow’s
http://blogdex.net
social networks as technology
• collaborative filtering and/or recommender
systems; e.g., amazon.com’s feature: “People
who bought this book also bought...”
social networks as popular culture
• e.g., six degrees of kevin bacon
• bacon number: definition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
– kevin bacon has a bacon number of 0
– an actor, A, has a bacon number of 1 if s/he appeared in a
movie with kevin bacon
– an actor, B, has a bacon number of 2 if s/he appear in a
movie with A
– etc.
• try this with the internet movie database: e.g.,
http://imdb.com/name/nm0000102/board/nest/4534991
• or, have it done automatically here, at the “oracle of bacon”:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/
social networks as popular culture
• social software; e.g., friendster, orkut, tribe, etc.
• recall the article by danah boyd: what happens
to social networks when they are explicitly
declared?
– “[danah] emphasize[s] how users have repurposed
the technology to present their identity and connect in
personally meaningful ways while the architect works
to define and regulate acceptable models of use.”
• to understand “artificial” social networks we
need to rethink the social scientific concepts of
“equivalence,” “centrality,” even “node” and
“link.”
social networks as art
Ben Discoe’s, Friendster Map
http://www.washedashore.com/people/friendster/friendster1.html
social networks as art
Mark Lombardi, Global Networks
http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lombardi.html
social networks as art
Official Computer Scene Sexchart
http://www.attrition.org/hosted/sexchart/
social networks as art
• Josh On (Futurefarmers), They Rule
• http://www.theyrule.net/
social networks as art
Jonah Peretti, Nike Sweatshop Email
http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/peretti.html
social networks as art
Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks
http://translationmap.walkerart.org
Warren Sack, Conversation Map
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack/cm
social networks as art
Angie Waller, Data Mining the Amazon
http://www.couchprojects.com/amazonweb/pages/title.htm
social networks as art
• Thanks to Steve Dietz for these art links. See here for
more examples:
http://www.yproductions.com/WebWalkAbout/archives/000377.html#more
visualizing (social) networks
• See Martin Dodge’s “Cybergeography” website
for many examples of how networks can be
visualized:
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html
next time
• media ownership