And isn't that just the most brilliant of segue ways into talking about yesterday's INFS lecture on social network analysis?!? (I know, right. So skilled).
Coming to understand the fundamentals of a social network (social entities, such as an individual, corporation, a collective social unit tied together with other social entities through certain types of social ties (formal relations, behavioural interaction)) really came down to a large number of things than I would have initially thought.
For instance, whilst it was kind of obvious and easy to understand that if there are two social entities involved then the relationship between them will be dyadic, and if there are three entities it will be triadic, I didn't actually realise that you could further define these types of relations as being one of two types.
Transitivity is the relation we encounter most often in day to day life, when a person likes another person, and then that second person likes a third person, it is assumed that the first person will also like the third person.
Alternatively, there is the notion of balance being related to social network analysis, which involves the notion that if the first person and the second person like each other, they should have a similar liking or evaluation of the third person. Or if they dislike each other, then their liking of the third person will be different.
So up until this point a lot of what was being said was kind of obvious and easy to grasp. Then, it didn't get harder, more it became more technical.
We live in a world where understanding how social networks function is highly important, just becuase there are so many networks out there and they are such a fundamental aspect of every day life for so many people.
I mean, they've been in existence, these social networks for so long, that you would have thought that even those in the early time periods had some way of determining who was the pivotal person in any social network. This person was probably king though so I don't think they'd have had such a hard time as we do nowadays in figuring this out.
And the first of the tools that are used to figure this out is called the degree of centrality. Ultimately it means figuring out who the core member of a group is, the person at the centre. Whilst you can only measure this in an undirected network, it nonetheless determines how central a person in the network is by looking at the relationships between that person and all the others. Furthering this you can measure the node closeness centrality (how close every other person is to that focal person) as well as the betweenness centrality of a node (how central a person is looking at the relationship from each of the other people within the network. Really the person has the most interactions with other people, or who has the most ties to each person).
Lastly, there is the measurement of the degree of prestige of a node within a network. This works to determine how well regarded a person in a network is. Only applicable to directed networks, what is important here is the number of relations going into the particular node. Not the ones from the focus node to other people, but from other people to that focus node. This enables a social network analyst to determine who the most respected member of a society might be.
Really, at the end of the day, social network analysis allows us to sit down at the bus interchange with all the free time on our hands and conclude as to which screaming child would be the one to hold hostage and make the others shut up.
Or does that only happen in movies?
Image 1 available: http://www.talentsfromindia.com/social-network-web-developers-programmers.html
Image 2 available: http://www.freeiconsdownload.com/Free_Downloads.asp?id=661
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