The Social Web

person writes: "The Stanford Social Web calculates social interactions of members of the Stanford University network, using links and text from home pages, as well as information about mailing list subscriptions. Though the site's analysis of user relationships and similarities is limited to those with Stanford accounts, it is of interest to those studying the formation of social networks. The java applet is especially nifty." Don't even try the java applet if you don't have a fast machine, PIII or higher.

Comments

Hmm...

[crisco]

That java visualization thingie is neat, but at first glance it tells me exactly what I already kinda know, that there is a core group of people that are social, that generally know each other and have lots more 'connections'. Then there are those on the fringes, that have less connections, that only have relationships with a few others.

Sounds just like real life, right? One thing about measuring this via weblinks and such is that you are going to get different results than real life social connections. We all know that some of us are great socializers online but not so good at it in person, we all know of some people that might be great in real life but haven't a clue how they would manifest that online. I think the intersting paper is where these two 'sets' overlap and don't overlap. Considering the study is on individuals at a college campus with geographic proximity, the results would differ from people in general.

I only skimmed the paper and didn't see too much, however, an interesting chart was the difference between Stanford and MIT, MIT had twice the percentage of people that linked to someone else at school and nearly three times the percentage of both 'who are linked to by at least one other person' and 'with links in both directions'. So MIT has more online culture? Again, I'd like to see the overlap with real life social interaction.

One last thought, isn't this a social engineer's dream? Use this data to exploit connections between people? Impersonate a friend of a friend? It could backfire, what if a friend of a friend measured via links and mailing list participation are actually close friends in real life...

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

from the web

[rockrat]

Being a Stanford student, I was currious how well it did on me and my friends. The output is pretty much dead on. It picks out my roomate as my as the person closest to me, and most of my friends as well. Not particularly suprising, given that we are all on similar listserv lists (and all residence in each dorm are on a dorm list). Nevertheless, pretty striking. I'd be currious how it did in a less highly connected (in terms of listserv and homepage connectivity) community.

To what purpose, I wonder

[Trevor Goodchild]

I often wonder about the long-term effects of putting so much effort into creating - and now analysing - digital "culture". I'm not advocating being a luddite or anything, but more and more often these days we see online social interaction not adding to but replacing more traditional forms of human contact.

Usually you replace something that is broken or flawed. So what's so flawed about normal socializing that we feel this need to supplant it with something that is in reality more isolating?

Just some idle thought on my part. Feedback?

Re:To what purpose, I wonder

[actiondan]

I often wonder about the long-term effects of putting so much effort into creating - and now analysing - digital "culture". I'm not advocating being a luddite or anything, but more and more often these days we see online social interaction not adding to but replacing more traditional forms of human contact.

One thing that is different about electronic communication as opposed to older methods is that relationships can be formed based on interests rather than geographical location.

This could be viewed as an advantage - those with similar interests can get together regardless of where they are in the world.

On the other hand, the ease with which people can find and communicate with people like them could be viewed as a bad thing for society; people are not forced to mix with those that are different to them and some valuable "cross-pollenation" of ideas may be lost

The thing to remember is that social systems are not neccessarily replaced because they do not work. Often, a new system will be more attractive to a particular group at a particular time so they adopt it. There is no ruling council of humanity that decides which things are good for us and can dictate which we should adopt (unless you are really paranoid). Even if there were, it is likely that sub-cultures would adopt their own systems regardless.

In many ways, the success of electronic socializing has been due to the fact that it makes things easier for individuals rather than for society. Online, you can present yourself as you want to be seen. You do not have extra stress involved in a face to face meeting where you have to be aware of body langauge, facial expresssions and perhaps even the possibility of physical contact (welcome or unwelcome). By taking away all these considerations, electronic socializing makes it easier to think about what is being said. (of course, it is also easier to lie online...)

Just my ideas...

What?

[swagr]

An applet? Not Flash? Am I on the right web?

Backwards compatibilirt

[MarkusQ]

Yes, but can you sort the links by Erdos number?

--MarkusQ