A recent article in Wired Magazine reports on one entrepreneur’s vision to harness the power of social networks in an effort to provide people with an opportunity to influence public policy:

“Six Apart co-founder Anil Dash plans to reinvent the way the government listens to its citizens. We’re not talking about wiretapping. Rather, he wants to solicit expert opinions on scientific matters through a new social network belonging to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Expert Labs. Dash pumped his idea Wednesday afternoon during a keynote address at the Web 2.0 conference in New York.

The new Expert Labs social platforms, Dash said in a statement, have the potential to “make our government better, make our society better, advance scientific research and make people feel more connected to those social institutions that serve them””

Full Article Here

A November 26th, 2009, column in The Los Angeles Times, titled “A Connected Life is a Great Gift” discusses the importance of social networks during the holiday season.  The authors James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis summarize some of the findings presented in their new book Connected, focusing how at this time of the year, keeping your friends and family around is important.  They write:

“Recent research has shown that we would rather give an anonymous gift to a friend who will never repay us than give a gift to a stranger who will. The reason is that we give to sustain our network. In fact, the natural advantages of a connected life explain why social networks have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years. So as we gather for the holidays, it is important to consider the extraordinary power of our social networks. We not only help ourselves by staying connected, we also help our whole community.”

Full article here

An October 17, 2009, column in The New York Times, titled “Networks Too Big for Their Own Good” questions the “strength” and utility of weak ties in the age of social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Author Jon Picoult writes of the implications of networking in large networks for employers and recruiters seeking qualified candidates for jobs:

 “As the definition of people’s “networks” has expanded to include not just colleagues they’ve known for a decade, but also practically everyone they pass on the street, the quality of those connections has been greatly diluted. What rational conclusions can companies draw from this relationship game?”

 The full article is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/jobs/18pre.html?ref=jobs

If you haven’t done so already, this is a reminder to check out the September issue of the American Politics research journal which we previously mentioned in this post.

The  September 2009 theme issue is titled “Social Networks and American Politics.” The issue draws on work presented at the first “Networks in Political Science” conference held at Harvard University in 2008 and co-chaired by David Lazer and James Fowler. In the introductory article, Michael T. Heaney and Scott D. McClurg write:

“…network analysis has expanded during the last decade within the study of American politics, contributing to knowledge about political institutions, behavior, and network theory. Promising directions for future research include the study of power, preference aggregation, information flow and transaction costs, and network dynamics.”

The issue features research on the influence of networks on political institutions and political behavior, the use of game theory and network theory to explain coordination problems, and the role of interdependence and density dependence in political networks.

The table of contents for the theme issue can be found here:

http://apr.sagepub.com/content/vol37/issue5/

Communication professors Janet Fulk and Peter Monge, along with Annenberg Ph.D. graduate Y. Connie Yuan, won the 2009 Dennis Gouran Research Award in Group Communication from the National Communication Association for the best published article of the year. “Connective and Communal Transactive Memory Systems,” published in Communication Research is an article about empirical study of teams from around the globe.

The article is an empirical study of teams from around the globe.  The research assessed how individuals in teams make choices about when to seek and share information with teammates through direct communication with each other versus using shared databases for acquiring or sharing information.  The research was based in an integration of three theories:  social influence, public goods, and transactive memory. Yuan now serves on the faculty of Cornell University.

James Fowler

The Annenberg Networks Network is pleased to invite you to a presentation given by James Fowler, associate professor in the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at CALIT2 and the political science department at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr Fowler’s work is in the areas of social networks, behavioral economics, evolutionary game theory, political participation, cooperation, and genopolitics (the study of the genetic basis of political behavior).

The title of the talk at USC – and of Fowler’s recently published book – is “Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives.”

The presentation will take place on November 23rd, at noon in the Geoffrey Cowan Forum (ASC Room 207), Annenberg, University of Southern California.

Parking information and directions to campus.

Change and External Events in Computer-Mediated Citation Networks: English Language Weblogs and the 2004 U.S. Electoral Cycle

James Moody announces the publishing of a new blog network paper by Carter Butts and Remy Cross in the Journal of Social Structure.

Journal of Social Structure

From the authors:

“This study examines global patterns of stability and change within six longitudinal samples of English-language weblogs (or “blogs”) during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election campaign. Using distance-based methods of graph comparison, we explore the evolution of the blog-blog citation networks for each sample during the period. In addition to describing the qualitative dynamics of the blog networks, we relate major campaign events (e.g., party political conventions and debates) to the observed pace of change. As we demonstrate, such events are associated with substantial differences in overall network volatility; moreover, volatility is also shown to have strong seasonal and endogenous components. Our findings suggest that external factors (both regular and episodic) may be important drivers of network dynamics.”