4th week

Fourth week Summary(“Social networks”)
First we considered key points. What is a social networks? Social networks include school ties and personal relationships. We had studied especially number five of it. It is “People make media and then media make people.”. Does new media technologies usually reinforce existing social networks or even work to isolate people? Yes, but no. When new media technologies facilitate new social networks, they simultaneously challenge existing social, political and economic relationships. For example, when we use a messenger, we seemed to isolated person in a room but we are actually connected to each other by messenger. We can experience a abundant relationship by media’s new social networks.
Social network analysis is an interdisciplinary social science. In fact, scholars hated people in past who had tried to study one’s field. However recently, physicists and mathematicians have made large contributions to understanding networks in general (not text, as graphs) and thus contributed to an understanding of social networks too. Nowadays, many scholars cover other field and cross the boarder because interdisciplinary people will be a insightful. Anyway graph(visualization) is helping us to understand a relationship. We watched jesus’s relationship represented by lines a kind of graph. And then we also observed J.L. Moreno (1934) Friendship choices between 4th grade boys (triangles) and girls (circles). Circles represent the females and triangles represent the males and lines represent relationship of each other. We can think that we do activities like eating and drinking together to line between each other. And then we also saw graph of family relationship. Special feature of it is that it has no fixed centrality because centrality is come down. Through these activities, we can know pattern so we can predict or cope with changing easily.
Stanley Milgram(1967) had a so interesting experiment(“The small world problem”). Participants could only pass the letters (by hand) to personal acquaintances who they thought might be able to reach the target(to Boston from Kansas). In a result, six degrees of this activity can send letter to Boston from Kansas. That is mean small society, new perspective. We also can listen Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties”. Week relationship is more strength than strong relationship. For example, when we look for a job, friend doesn’t introduce a job to enter the job himself because two people have a similar talent, interesting. However acquaintances introduce new job to us because they have no similar talent, interesting with us. Also we inspected bridging capital and bonding capital. If you connect separate networks, you have bridging capital. Or if you are central to a network, you have bonding capital.
A A – B
/ /ooo \
A oooooB - B
oooooooo\
oooooooooB
(Italic are bridging capital, Bold are bonding capital)
Sociologist Robert Putnam claims that united states citizens no longer know or trust thir neighbors and thus communities have lost their social capital. Korea is too. When did we start to lose it? That is after the second world war. We don’t need a social boss. We need a centrality. Social boss can be a virtual image designed from us. We need a central group and central thought. Nowadays, we seem to be personal because of variety but definitely there is centrality in each groups(have same thought or same goal) because people relax their attention when they belong to specific structure.
And then, we inspected Amazon.com. They know customer’s taste and interesting (surveying shopping list) so they can recommend some books to customers. Besides, they show what did another (bought same book) buy other books. Therefore they connect customer to other customer. Bacon number was same things. Bacon was connected another by movies. And then we saw Danah’s invention. It was so interesting representation system. Interestingly, she did major in politics. Moreover we saw many representation of social networks.(Ben Discoe’s, Friendster Map and Mark Lombardi, Global Networks and Official Computer Scene Sexchart and Josh On, They Rule and Jonah Peretti, Nike Sweatshop Email and Warren Snack and Sawad Brooks and Angie Waller, Data Mining the Amazon …). They embody our relationships.
Why did they endeavor represent like these things? We want to report effectively about information, know pattern. Then we should new method.
My opinion
This class is so interesting to me. I like to meet my friend so I have interested social networks. Specially, many graph made my eyes to be enjoyed. In fact, I had not known that there are many methods to represent our relationship. Therefore one after another are so interesting and great! Besides, I can know real purpose of these vilsualizations. I recall professor Sangjun, Lee’s word.(computer enginnering) He said “Painting has more valuable than text when one inform information to others. For example when we see a painting of primitive man we can recognize information easily!” Then I can think of “be effective”, one more time. Also I will draw my map of relationships or my tasks. It help me to know effective access to problem. Anyway, in 21c emphasizing relationships this class did teach me to how I embody it effectively.