After reading the Coleman (1988) article, I was surprised by his statistics of high school drop out rates. The article stated that the raw drop out rate for "Other Private Schools" was 11.9% (p. S115). I went to a independent college prep school, which I am sure falls into this category since it is neither a public nor a Catholic school. I'm not sure about other types of schools that fall into this category, but 11.9% seems awfully high for my school and others of the kind. As I remember, no one from my school "dropped out" in the sense that they decided not to finish high school, in the six years I was at the school (7th through 12th grade). Those that left went to another school to finish. I wonder if the 11.9% also reflects students that leave high school to attend another. In this case, the statistic might make more sense, though would not accurately capture the idea of "dropping out". I called the Associate Head of School for my high school (who also happens to be my father, but that's beside the point), and he confirmed what I had been thinking. In his estimation, 5 to 10 students are expelled for various reasons, but every one of them will attend another school come January or September. Similarly, my high school takes a couple of students each January or September that were expelled from another private school. Also, at the end of 8th grade, some number of students choose not to attend the high school and opt to go to a different school, though this would not figure into the high school drop out rates. And perhaps 1 or 2 students will voluntarily leave the school because they have been accepted to another one, like a transfer. Overall 6 to 12 students leave each year out of a student population of about 450. Even though none are dropping out, as it were, depending out how Coleman calculated the statistic this could contribute to the drop out rate.

I think that this low drop out rate could be attributed to the densely connected network of faculty and administration. The teachers, obviously, teach during the day, then they coach in the afternoon, and eat dinner in the same dining hall with the students. At the end of the day, teachers go back to the dorms where they live in the same buildings as the students (as "dorm parents") and take turns being on duty, checking in with the students, some even have the students over to their apartments in the dorms and bake for them. The administrators, too, usually teach one course a year and coach one sport. Both teachers and administrators are advisers with a group of 5 to 10 students each. This allows for the faculty and administrators to have close connections with the students. My father described it as specialized parenting. When a student needs help with homework, or needs advice, or wants to go to the mall, all these activities are organized and specialized by person, whereas outside of the school, a teenager might go to their same parents for all of these needs. In addition, because the teachers all live on the same campus, are each others' neighbors, work together in the departments, coach together and eat together, as well as attend meetings together, the people that work at the school are a densely knit group with many redundant ties. For example, a Latin teacher might coach football with a history teacher in the fall and coach track with a math teacher in the spring, and have a biology teacher living upstairs. Perhaps this dense interconnectedness contributes to the virtually 0% drop out rate and the virtually 100% college acceptance rate.

I wonder what other types of schools fall into the "Other Private Schools" category to reach the 11.9% drop out rate.

Visualization of Social Networking

Looking at the graphs on the article on Obesity by Christakis and Fowler, I've realized that I've always only thought of social networking as a series of status updates, tweets, and comments. I've never thought of social networking as something other than an online phenomenon, an idea that was immediately disproved during class. In all of the numerous studies that I've read, online and offline, I don't remember a single one showing a graph of the subjects and their relation to one another. The relation between subjects never seemed important to me, as test subjects always seemed to be random. Over all my years of reading studies, I have only seen one significant graph of a social network, and it didn't come from a study...

A few years ago , as Facebook began allowing developers to write web applications for Facebook users, one developer released an app called Friend Wheel. This app was specifically designed to visually represent the connections between your Facebook friends. Each of your friends are placed around a circle in an optimal location, where a line is drawn in between each mutual friendship. My Friend Wheel can be found here (hopefully the link works). As you can see, the large group of connections in the top left is mostly comprised of people from my high school, where everyone pretty much added everyone else as friends, and the smaller group on the bottom represents people from Northeastern, where people seemed to be slightly more hesitant about adding people they don't know as well.

As several of my Facebook friends started to add the application and post their "wheels" on their walls, I decided to try it out. Nonetheless, I was very intrigued at first sight, as I had never seen a network graph before. After not seeing my wheel for years, I went back to it today, and was surprised at how much it had grown since I have gone to college. However, knowing more about networks, I feel that it could be more accurate if new features such as strong and weak ties were incorporated, as it could be a very simple, one click replacement for more complicated software like Visone.

As a follow up to what I mentioned in class about how architecture shapes networks and community, I figured I would post a bit more about the history of the Garbatella. (Over the summer as part of a class we studied modernity and realism in Rome, part of which included a couple of classes held in this neighborhood.) The area was constructed to be low income housing for workers just outside the city of Rome, accessible by public transportation, but far enough outside the boarders of the city that real estate is much cheaper. What was revolutionary at the time, and still is in most places today, was the idea that the architecture informs and shapes how people live and interact in a space. The buildings were made out of cheap materials- tuffa (a local bedrock), stucco, and concrete instead of marble and other types of stone used in the city of Rome, but instead of building identical apartment complexes like the ones that can be seen in the projects of Boston, the architects took the time to make buildings that were tied to the Italian culture. (i.e. instead of statues, intricate staircases and fountains, made out of marble, the architects made concrete gargoyles, and other accents out of the cheaper material in order to make the neighborhood continue the same stylistic traditions that can be seen all over Italy) The idea was that if the space looks unique and beautiful, then the people would be much more likely to respect and want to help keep up their neighborhood. The buildings were also made to incorporate areas of common spaces where residents must necessarily interact with one anther like courtyards, communal laundry lines, gardens, and even a communal bath house, which functioned up into the 1900s. The residents could capitalize on communal parenting of children, since many of them worked long hours in the city. For that to happen, though, they needed to trust and rely on other people in the community. Though the buildings took longer to build than the identical complexes we can see on the boarder of Northeastern, the payoff was big.

In a documentary and according to many other research done on the area, the residents formed tightly knit networks of people who had identities based on which lot they lived in instead of just to their families/history. In fact, many would and still do refer to each other by first name and then "of lot *insert number*" Highly interconnected and closed networks of people were formed, much as there was only one entrance built into the community. As a result, the crime rates were low, and today, a tiny apartment in a building in the middle of the Garbatella that has been privatized is up for sale at over a million dollars. The Garbatella was built to be reminiscent of British Garden Cities, where there were gardens, businesses, and housing in a sustainable mini-city. Traditionally, the Garbatella has a long, liberal history, with a lot of politically charged graffiti about freedom and unionization still up on many of the walls, which was made possible by the ease with which people could discuss their ideas and spread information. Indeed, the Garbatella fosters high social capital. The people trusted each other, created social norms, communal identities, and drew upon the different strengths of the people living there to create a strong sense of community and social ties even though they were not socio-economically well off. Had the architecture been different, the Garbatella would probably have been much similar to the projects in Boston, which are usually viewed as places of higher crime rates, substance abuse, disarray in the school systems, and a general lack of safety.

Diminishing Intergenerational Closure

A mother and father always worry a great deal more about their first born child than maybe the third or fourth child. When a person is new at doing something, such as being a parent, they act with a lot more precaution. Parents will make sure to know where their child is at all times, what their child is doing, and who their child is with. The Coleman article suggests that in order to stay on top of their child’s whereabouts and activities, parents will often make an effort to become friends with the parents of their children’s friends. This type of occurrence is called intergenerational closure.

As the oldest child of four, I agree with Coleman’s assertions. In my youth, my parents made an effort to be friends with my friends’ parents. They would sit on the sidelines at soccer games with my friends’ parents, go out to eat with them, invite them and their child to my birthday parties, etc. My parents also made a similar effort with the second child in my family. However, I’d like to argue that intergenerational closure diminishes with sibling position.

By the time the third and fourth children in my family came around, my parents acted a lot less frantic and worrisome about where the younger children were and what they were doing. They had already been through the trials and tribulations of raising babies, toddlers, and teenagers, so raising two more children was nothing new. Since my parents had been through this before, they seemed to not make as great of an effort to befriend the parents of my younger siblings’ friends. Therefore, there was a diminishing degree of intergenerational closure between my parents and the two youngest in the family.

This lack of intergenerational closure also contributes to Coleman’s idea that IQ scores in children decline with sibling position. When intergenerational closure occurs, parents are often more in tune with how their child is performing academically. Through communication with other parents, a child’s parents gain a better understanding of what material is being taught in the classroom, how other students are performing, and what the teacher is like. Without intergeneration closure, this communication does not exist. I push Coleman’s discussion further by suggesting that less adult attention is not the only cause of lesser intelligence in children. I believe that diminished intergenerational closure, leads to diminished educational social capital for a child and hence also contributes to the child being weaker educationally.

Social Capital and the Race to Nowhere

I'm not sure how many other people in the class decided to attend the free screening of The Race to Nowhere by Peace Through Play, but it definitely put the Coleman article in a different perspective for me. The movie is an 85 minute or so documentary about the high degree of cheating, stress-induced illness, and inability to adapt that pervades the United States' school system. It demonstrates that there are two distinct kinds of social capital parents are capable of spending on their children, and one of them may actually lower human capital rather than increasing it.

The first kind of social capital increases by building a positive overall relationship with your children. Things like family game nights, dinner as a family, and other united activities increase this sort of capital. So long as this capital increases, children will become more productive as a result of being happier and wanting to please their parents. Students that have a positive outlook on their family and home life will likely perform better under stress knowing that their parents will support them no matter what.

The second kind of social capital, purely educational social capital, can result in decreased productivity and intelligence. If all the parent and child communicate about is school, homework, and getting into a good school, the stress can become unbearable for the younger party. If the relationship between the two is only about schoolwork a single poor grade can and probably will destroy the kid's sense of self-worth. As a result the student stresses out over every single assignment and thus decreases their emotional well-being, an important aspect of human capital that Coleman neglected in his study on high schools.

The film raised a lot of interesting questions about the American school system and the Coleman reading allowed me to get a different perspective on it than I had anticipated. I highly recommend the documentary to every one else in the class.

Eighth Grade Again

I would like to expand on the topic of teacher-teacher and teacher-student and ties that we discussed in class yesterday, as well as how various student groupings affect learning and socialization. Jackie provided very interesting insight on how the complete separation of her eighth grade class inhibited the socialization between teams. My post will also be on my eighth grade experiences, but with a different setting.

My family moved to Israel the summer between my 7^th and 8^th grade school years and we spent my 8^th grade school year in Israel while my mother was in a temporary position there. The school I attended was a private school, one of the American International Schools (AIS). The students were embassy kids, a very culturally diverse but socio-economically similar set of students from all different countries. The set-up was very similar to what Professor Lazer discussed in class, a fact I didn’t recognize until later.

In class, we discussed a setup where all students in a school attended a homeroom class each morning that was a full half-hour, not just a quick five minute hi/bye. The homeroom class was the same set of students with the same teacher, each and every year. One particularly valuable attribute of the program was that the students in each homeroom were a diverse set. My eighth grade year met this description in almost every way. We spent a full half-hour each day. We met with the same teacher, the same students. The diversity factor was met culturally and personality-wise, but there was a somewhat clear split between the classes in terms of academics. It appeared to me that Homeroom A was the top 25% and bottom 25% in terms of academic performance. Homeroom B appeared to be the kids in the middle of the pack. I think that this split was probably an attempt by the administration to encourage diversity and mixing between the top and bottom performing students, but the distinct split made it clear the mixture was not random.

We also talked about the idea of teaching teams vs. tracks. I think that what a teaching team is probably varies by who you ask, but I think my middle school probably met the definition in many senses of the word. All math teachers (middle and high school) met to set curriculum and discuss all students. All eighth-grade teachers met to discuss student performance as well as upcoming projects and tests (we never had a big project and a big test on the same day, which was very helpful.)

One final thing noted in class that was striking to me when I reflected on my eighth grade experience was the note that being a homeroom teacher was valuable to the teacher in terms of the progression of the teacher’s career. Thinking about it, I realized that two years after I left AIS, Homeroom B’s teacher was promoted to headmaster of the entire AIS school (K-12). Her connections to students, teachers, and administration catapulted her to a position of utmost importance, especially because the following year the school moved to a new location with brand-new facilities. I would think that her connections would be especially important in keeping the cohesion of the teaching staff during such a move.

Balance in Social Capital

Coleman argued that social capital in the family and community can promote education and the best environment for the students. We expanded this further in class saying to combat large schools, students can be arranged in teams of teachers where the teachers all share the same students and information of any issues. My middle school employed this tactic by segregating us students into four teams for all our subjects outside gym, music, and art classes. Since our high school actually started in eighth grade, the school kept the eighth graders in these clusters while we were in the high school to somewhat shield us from the older students. The structure in high school for the eighth graders actually did not facilitate a positive school environment. The students were completely networked within their team and cut-off by classes and location from other students in their grade and especially from students in other grades. School events such as pep rallies or field days were awkward for the eighth graders since they had no school spirit and no connection to the school as a whole. There was little participation at sporting events, musicals, or other school wide events. Even the participation of the eighth graders in sports, band, or chorale were restricted to special eighth grade structures of closed networks and the students ended up completely isolated from the school around them.

My network from eighth grade was completely different from the rest of my high school career once I was integrated in the band for 9th to 12th grade, clubs, gained school spirit, and a sense of belonging. Although a structure system of networked teachers sharing students may benefit the academic portion of schooling there is the community social capital of the school to consider, which was drastically decreased by isolation. Although my high school only had 300 students in my graduating class, school size of 1500 students, the clusters of eighth graders were around 75 students. I found the ability to take classes with a variety of students, post eighth grade, more conducive to learning than seeing the same kids all day long hearing the same opinions of each student. The right sized school could combine both sides to the social capital argument; networking in different grades, clubs, and students in different classes was good for diversity, but also promoted the social capital of the school to come together for an art show or the Friday night football games.

Questioning Coleman's Catholic Conclusions

While I agree with most of the information Coleman presented in his paper on social capital, I did find myself disagreeing with his conclusions on Catholic high schools. When he first introduced the idea that parents of a Catholic school are closely related due to their children going to the same school and shared religion, I thought of the Catholic high school in my hometown. I know many of the students who attended the high school and not only did most of their parents not know each other, but most of the parents and students did not practice the religion or were not Catholic at all. Most parents had enrolled their children in this high school expecting them to be well behaved as a result, but it actually had the opposite effect. Students from the Catholic high school partied much more frequently and drug use was more prevalent there then at the public high school. Although this is only one example and could be misleading of what most other Catholic schools are like, it led me to question Coleman’s data and conclusions.

As I began to question why the data showed the low dropout rates I began referring back to original data of the family effects on dropout rate. I noticed that the difference incurred from whether or not the students mother expected college (8.6 %)was similar to the difference between public schools and Catholic schools (9.2 %). I thought there would be a correlation between these two numbers because it is my guess that the mother of every Catholic school child would expect them to go to college. My reasoning for this is that if the parents were paying money for their child’s high school education, they would expect them to go to college to further their education and get more out of their investment. There are many other factors to consider and this would not be the only explanation but I feel as though the difference in dropout data between Catholic and public high schools is more of a result of family structure than religion. I think that religion has some impact but Coleman ignored too many other factors when forming his conclusions on the reasons for a low dropout rate in Catholic schools.

Forbidden Triads

One of the most interesting aspects of Granovetter's "The Strength Of Weak Ties" was his discussion of the "forbidden triad", which is labeled as a triad where there is a strong tie between two sets of people, A & B and A & C, but there is no tie, not even a weak one, between B & C. Granovetter begins by saying that this is the least likely of all triads to occur, which I agree with, however he then admits he will be exaggerating for the following section by assuming such a triad NEVER occurs.

Thinking about my own social life and that of my friends, I thought this was a poor exaggeration to make, even if it is far more likely that there would be a tie between B & C, given the other strong ties in the triad. As college students, we are in unique positions in our lives where most of us have a strong group of friends from our hometowns and childhoods, and then a new set of friends we made upon entering Northeastern. If I label myself as person "A", and say I have strong ties to my friend from home "B" and my friend from Northeastern "C", there is a very strong chance that B and C have never met each other, creating a forbidden triad. For me personally this is not the case for most of the triads in my life involving a close friend from home and a close Northeastern friend. Since my hometown is only about thirty miles from Boston, many of my friends from home have come to visit me at Northeastern and have met my closest friends here. However, not all of my high school friends have met all of my college friends, and for students from different states, this scenario is far less likely. I would imagine that there are huge amounts of forbidden triads in almost every college student's life.

Eliminating a forbidden triad involving two friends equally as important in my life but from two different spheres is definitely something that creates a sense of relief. Creating even a weak tie between the two is comforting and makes the two parts of my life feel less disjointed, and it's nice to know when I reference one friend, the other friend knows who I am talking about at a more personal level and not from just pictures and stories.

Economic Networks

I'm reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. It's a very good book about how the Western powers have induced and exploited economic and political chaos in developing nations to lay a framework for free-trade and little economic regulation, generally very unpopular with the people of the nations they are imposed upon. She never mentions networks in the book, but it occurred to me that much of what she describes could be reconceived in a network structure. I know that thinking of the global economy as a network is certainly not a new idea, but it is interesting to take the situations she describes and think of them in a new way.

One situation was in early 1970's Chile. The government was moving farther and farther left creating an increasingly socialist society with the support of the people. The US was worried that the government would nationalize American holdings and subsidiaries. So, Nixon wanted to induce an economic crash and depose Allende, the president. To do this, the US government tampered with the flow of money in and out of Chile, playing with the structure of the network. If thought of with a valued, directional graph, we could see that the US pumped a significant amount of money into Chile with loans and was a significant buyer of Chilean exports, mainly copper. The US government severed these edges by both public and private American loans and by suspending the purchase of copper for six months. It's interesting to me to think of it not just as the US changing policies regarding Chile, but rather in the context of a network being manipulated. If Chile and the US are thought of as nodes, the US reduced Chile's degree, and this drastically affected Chile.

Another example is the economic collapse of South East Asia in the 90's. Klein states that it started with a rumor that Thailand didn't have sufficient reserved to back its currency, and mutual funds share holders started divesting from Thailand. The problem was that the mutual funds had holdings in Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and other SE Asian countries, so divesting from the mutual fund meant pulling money out of all of the countries at the same time, inciting economic crashes across the board. I picture this as a two-mode graph showing that the countries all belong to the same mutual funds. This way the graph would indicate that what happens to one, happens to all of them. While the countries may not have been linked directly with trade, they were all connected by an outside organization, and that meant the failure of one meant the failure of all of them.

I haven't fully thought it through, but it seems like to hold its prestigious economic position, the Western powers need to hold on to centrality in the network. By opening up the world to free trade, Western multinationals have been able to syphon money out of the economies of developing nations. Western corporations seek to increase their indegree by placing branches and gaining holdings in countries around the world. They may also hold a high level of betweenness by being the countries that are able to make finished products or refine raw materials. One of Ghana's economic problems is that they have raw materials and they have factories, but they have to way to refine materials sufficiently for the factories. So, ore has to be shipped out to be refined, only to be shipped back to be made into a finished product. The transportation and the cost of trade significantly increases the cost of the final product (as well as other factors), making domestic products less desirable. Clearly, it is in the interest of the Western countries to be in the middle of this transaction. Not only are they making money on refining ore for Ghana to produce their own goods, but Western good are still cheaper and more desirable. This gives Western powers a higher level of betweenness than Ghana because more trade has to go through them.

I'm no economist, and I'm sure I have a few thing mixed up. But I'm very interested in this stuff, so please comment and set me straight if I have my facts wrong. Really, I'm just trying to imagine the information I'm getting from this book with the network terms that we discussed in class yesterday.

What are my chances of becoming obese?

I found all of the reading to be very interesting and thought provoking, as I have never thought about social networks in this way. I had heard of the six degrees of separation and a small world theories, but had never thought about how connected we all really are. Even the fact that after hours of research, someone happened to find a Russian supporting cast that were all 8 degrees away from Kevin Bacon absolutely surprised me. One concept that I am having a hard time grasping is the Three degrees of influence theory. Lets say I am closely connected with 20 people, and those people all know 20 people who all know 20 more people. That means that there are 8000 people who are all three degrees from me. How do these people have any influence on my life? One example that hung me up was the obesity graph in the TED talk. I think I remember hearing that if someone three degrees from me is obese, I am 10% more likely to be obese. What if there is one obese person, and 7999 skinny people three degrees from me? Am I still 10% more likely to be obese? How about if all 8000 people are obese? I believe that that percentage would go way above 10%. In addition, I believe Christakis also said that if you have an obese person one degree away from you, you are about 50% more likely to be obese. What if I have one friend, and that friend is obese. I would think that my chances would be fairly high that I am obese as well. Now lets say I have 100 friends, and one is obese. Can I use backwards logic to say that I am much more likely to be skinny or fit, or am I still 50% more likely than someone with no obese friends to be obese. I am very interested in these connections, and I would like to look further into these numbers.

To Say Nothing of the Thin

The thing that strikes me in both the Christakis Ted Talk and the chapter overview is the omission of any information on patterns of the spread of "underweightness." Though I lack detailed statistics on the subject, this article from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that there has been a statistically significant decrease in underweight adults and children in the United States during the 2000's. Assuming Christakis and Fowler are correct and obesity spreads through social networks like a disease, either skinniness doesn't or the "virulence" of it is drastically decreasing in recent years as the spread of obesity has accelerated. Perhaps it's just the fact that obesity has become such a hot button issue and the two realized they could attract far more attention by discussing it, but I wonder what their research showed about people at the other end of the weight spectrum. It fascinates me that there could be "competing germs" that directly oppose one another, as these two do, and if anyone has additional information on the subject I would be grateful to hear it (a quick google search didn't yield anything besides the obesity article).

Another intriguing aspect of the Christakis and Fowler theory that I didn't see them elaborate on is that eating disorders clinics and "fat camps" are actually extraordinarily counter-productive. Just as they use the example of a smoker being surrounded by non-smokers in order to facilitate their quitting, the best method to treat both under- and overweight individuals might be to mix them together in the same group rather than isolating them with others who share similar problems. That way, their social network will not consist entirely of others who share their weight issues. This brings up another question that I couldn't find the answer to in the Ted Talk or book overview (I don't have the book yet due to Amazon super-saving shipping)-do they claim obese people get thinner if they have regular weight friends? Obese friends make you larger, apparently, but can you make your obese friends skinnier just by being around them? Spun that way, the research can be seen in a different light. That's my food for thought, anyway.

P.S. I've never collaborated on or even written a blog before, so hopefully I haven't committed any blogging faux pas. Thanks for reading!

-Michael

Introduction: Separation and Consistency of Identity

Many important pieces of paper call me Dominique, but I wouldn't say that's my "real name." More on that in a moment.

I've been a blogger/journaller (in varying proportions) since 2002, when I whirled through several journal sites before settling on LiveJournal. I have since switched my allegiance to Dreamwidth, which I have been using since closed beta.*

I will be cross-posting and cross-linking everything I contribute to this blog on Dreamwidth. For the class and anyone who happens upon The Networked Society by whatever means: you are welcome to follow me home to sofiaviolet. For my regular readers: you can visit The Networked Society to read everyone else's posts.

I have almost always been pseudonymous online, for certain values of pseudonymous: Sofia Blackthorne and sofiaviolet aren't on my passport or anything, but they're both me in a way my legal name isn't. I use them everywhere. This isn't the first time I've made a connection between my offline, "official" self and my online/offline "real" self, but it is the first time I've made the connection publicly in a manner that funnels people from Dominique to Sofia.

So I'm not super-strict in enforcing separation of my "official" self's (fairly minimal) online presence and the vast majority of what I do online. I avoid directing people from Dominique to Sofia and exercise caution in directing them from Sofia to Dominique. Basic internet skills.

As for internal separation, talking to one group of friends about this topic and another group of friends about some other topic under the same identity - I pretty much don't do it. This is an area where journal sites, like most social networking/social media** sites, kind of fall down on the job. Sites using the LiveJournal codebase (which include clones such as InsaneJournal and forks such as Dreamwidth) have filters (user-defined groups of people; entries can be restricted to a particular filter or to multiple filters), which can be used for this kind of separation as well as for privacy.

* I would like to devote another post to issues surrounding Dreamwidth: why the site came into existence, who has started using it and why, etc. I'd also like to talk about the experience of being an early adopter, something I'd never been before committing to Dreamwidth.

** In part three of her essay on Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure, synecdochic/denise (co-founder/co-owner of Dreamwidth) provides a nice disambiguation for social networking and social media:

The two terms are not interchangeable, ultimately. Social networking seeks to (for the most part) replicate a person's existing social web (think of sites like Classmates.com and LinkedIn.com); its purpose is to define your ties with others. Social media takes that one step further: it seeks to create and nurture social ties to others, through the content that you provide.

If you think of a site as a game, the "winning conditions" of the game will be a good clue as to whether the site is a social networking site or a social media site. If you win the game when you collect all of your existing friends, or collect as many new friends as possible, you're on a social network. If you win the game when you provide content that's interesting enough to get other people to build relationships with you, when your social currency is the content you provide, you're on a social media site.

This suggests to me that social media users may in fact benefit from talking to everyone about everything, in terms of creating these new relationships. Not simply because diverse content brings more diverse followers, but also because publicly available content brings more followers.

[Crossposted to Dreamwidth]

The Networked Society

I am pleased to introduce the "The Networked Society" blog. This blog is grounded in a class at Northeastern by the same name. This is a class about our personal and societal networks, with a bit of stuff around the impact and evolution of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). This blog is an experiment of sorts, where the intuition is that modern ICTs create a naturally blurring of boundaries, because information, identities, etc, naturally tend to flow from one context from another. One of the conundrums of the 21st century is how to manage this blurring, because often we want to block that information diffusion (e.g., perhaps this is why my oldest daughter will not accept my friending on Facebook). But there are also opportunities to enable discussions that would have been impossible just a few years ago, and the objective of tihs blog is to purposely blur the boundary between this class and the rest of the world-- this blog literally makes it possible for anyone in the world to participate in the course discussion.


How's this going to work? I (David Lazer) am going to post the sections of the syllabus currently being discussed in our class, with occasional commentary, and my students will also regularly post. And for any readers who happen to come across this, please feel to join in.


The first readings, which provide some motivation and overview for the importance of thinking of the world in terms of networks, are below:


Christakis and Fowler: Chapter 1 (available at): http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/LITTLems/ CHRISTAKIS_AND_FOWLER_0316036145._V234762121_.pdf Easley and Kleinberg, Chapter 1: Overview http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch01.pdf Gladwell, M. (1996). The tipping point. The New Yorker http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/tipping.pdf Listen to: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html