Damon Centola of MIT published an article in the first September issue of Science entitled “The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Experiment.” In it, he suggests that tightly clustered networks have more of an impact on health than weak ties. To see an article about his work, go to this link.

Or to check out the full article on the journal’s website.

International Seminar on Network Theory:
Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age

The international Network Theory Conference, organized by the ANN and SONIC research centers,  took place on Feb 19-20 at the University of Southern California. Bruno Latour delivered the keynote speech titled “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network theorist.” The four panels were focused on conceptual and methodological aspects of network theory, network inclusion and exclusion, network theories of power, and the semantic web. The list of presenters includes: Noshir Contractor, Peter Monge, Paul Leonardi, Yochai Benkler, Ernest J. Wilson III, Rahul Tongia, Karine Barzilai-Nahon, Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt, David Grewal, and Manuel Castells.

Additional information: conference program, participant biographies and presentation slides. Brief summaries of all presentations and Q&A sessions will soon be posted on the ANN website.

Watch the full video from the event below
(use the side arrows to move forward and back through the conference panels)

(YouTube playlist  link)

It seems that social networking sites are almost “old news” these days. As a media platform, social networking sites (SNS) have been around since the late 1990s, and today the popular SNS Facebook.com boasts more than 350 million active users (nevermind all those people who’ve registered for accounts never to actually use them).

So what’s next for SNS? For 2010, geo-tagging and geo-targeting appear to be the latest trends. The AP recently reported on the emergence of the SNS Foursquare.com as one of the latest buzz-sites. What’s the buzz about? Foursquare – which currently has over 100,000 users in 100 cities – is basically a social network for your immediate circle of friends (and a way to meet people nearby). You report where you’re at currently, and where you’ve been recently, and it’s mapped and tracked on Foursquare. The catch is, you earn points for checking in to locations, and the most recent person to check in becomes the “mayor”. So you compete against your friends to earn points. It sounds simple, but can become very addictive.

Foursquare isn’t alone. A number of other companies are venturing into the geo-SNS space. Google recently launched Latitude, phones are increasingly supporting GPS, and Windows 7 and Mac’s Snow Leopard will soon be enable to actively report location for laptop users.

Not that this is anything new for academics. In 2007, Lee Humphreys (now at Cornell University‘s Department of Communication) wrote an article looking how users form social groups and social ties in mobile networks. What’s so new in 2010? For one, there’s a much large network of resources available for users of these networks. With more and more users having GPS-enabled devices, it’s easier to share your location with others. And the evolution of SNS has made people more comfortable with the notion that others will know where you’re at. Advertisers are tapping into this trend too, as Ad Age notes in an article this week. Geo-SNS and geo-targeting are allowing advertisers to target consumers based not only on what they do, but also where they are at.

Interesting right? And for us, as researchers, the relationship between “location” and “network formation” looks to be an area for future work. Happy Holidays.

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• Will Facebook buy Foursquare? (thenextweb.com)
• Location’s Social Paradox (techcrunch.com)

The Washington Post has a new article citing Cacioppo’s article in the Descember issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The article focuses on how loneliness can spread through social networks using data from the Framingham study.

As the article says,”Although it may sound counterintuitive, loneliness can spread from one person to another, according to research being released Tuesday that underscores the power of one person’s emotions to affect friends, family and neighbors.” The article concludes, “The findings underscore the importance of social networks, several experts said. ‘For years, physicians and researchers thought about individuals as isolated creatures,’ said Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University. ‘We now know that the people you surround yourself with can have a tremendous impact on your well-being, whether it’s physical or psychological.’”

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

In the New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson writes an extensive article on Christakis’ and Fowler’s user of the Framingham Study to examine contagion processes of social behaviors. The article includes interviews with a variety of social networks researchers and a good analysis and critique of Christakis’ and Fowler’s conclusions. The article states: “IT’S TEMPTING TO think, confronted by Christakis and Fowler’s work, that the best way to improve your life is to simply cut your ties to people with bad behavior. And obviously this is possible; people change their friends often, sometimes abruptly. But reshaping your social network may be more challenging than altering your behavior. There’s also compelling evidence in their research that we do not have as much control as we might think we do over the way we’re linked to other people: our location in a social network, say, or how many of our friends know each other.” To read the full article, click here.