Manuel Castells

Reported by: Li Lu, Peter Knaack, & Lauren Frank

Manuel Castells is  University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Professor of Sociology and director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He is also Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 24 years.

Professor Castells started his talk with his view of how theory serves his work. He suggested that theory should be used to produce knowledge through research, so it is instrumental, not the value itself.  Therefore, theory should always be specific to context. Viewing the networked society as the background of the talk, Manuel proposed that power relationships are fundamental. In any society, those with power determine the rules. Fortunately, power is always balanced by counter-power. In this way, the society is going through constant challenges and evolving. Echoing Bruno Latour’s keynote speech, Castells pointed out that systems move through the actions of individuals.  In the current global network society context, specific social structures are produced, characterized by key organizational forms organized in interwoven networks, in which micro-electronic based technologies function as the key elements underlying these networks.

In suggesting that all this supports a theory of power and counter-power in the network society, Castells identified four different forms of power:

1)      Networking power refers to the power of the actors and organizations included in the networks that constitute the core of the global network society over human collectives or individuals who are not included in these global networks.

2)      Network power (as Grewall defined in the previous session) means the power resulting from the standards required to coordinate social interaction in the networks. In this case power is exercised not by exclusion from the networks but by the imposition of the rules of inclusion. Any social or network action requires social coordination, so it requires standards. These standards display network power. For example, once one protocol of communication gets accepted in the network, it becomes a form of power through imposing the rules of inclusion.

3)      Networked power indicates the power of social actors over other social actors in the network. The forms and processes of networked power are specific to each network. This type of power is the most complicated form. Throughout human history, there are two basic forms of power. The first one is coercive power. In this manner, actors can impose their will over others. The second form is persuasive power, which functions in the minds of people through constructing the meaning of actions. These two forms of power can combine in different proportions. But having the capacity to construct meaning through discourses (persuasive power) is fundamental. In other words, shaping the minds is the more effective way than torturing the bodies.

A worthy following question would be who has the networked power in a global network society. According to Castells, the answer is totally undetermined. However, that does not mean that dominance does not exist. Essentially, different forms of power organized in different networks of power are not unified. There is a distinction between the differentiation of power elite and the formation of ad-hoc elites in particular contexts. The traditional definition of power is not useful here; how these different networked powers connect to each other requires specific analysis.

4)      Finally, network-making power refers to the power to program specific networks according to the interests and values of the programmers, and the power to switch different networks by forming strategic alliances with different networks.  Programmers and switchers are not abstract concepts; they are simply people or actors in the networks. For instance, MIT establishes networks between scientific and military networks, which ensures the domination of MIT in scientific networks and of the US in military technology. Ultimately, these ideas materialize in the brains of social actors. Therefore, the key becomes connecting human networks via communication networks. Here, Castells emphasized that the shaping of communication networks has a decisive effect on other networks (e.g., agenda setting, gatekeeping effect of traditional media).

Of course, there are also mechanisms of counter-power in any society. People are not passive; they receive, challenge, and produce their own products. Thus, counter-power is exercised in a manner symmetrical to power. For instance, in the financial markets, a number of new criteria such as environmental standards have been introduced. Counter-power also works through disrupting network switches. For example, protests against the FCC remind the FCC to take the citizen rights into consideration.

Discussion

• Barzilai-Nahon: In terms of the identity of switchers and programmers, do these labels primarily refer to individuals, or can collectives have the same function? Is it possible that collectives create patterns of interaction which in turn provide the basis for the emergence of new switchers?

Castells: Actors in a network are not always individuals. However, when looking at the formation of an actor, individuals are at the root of collectives, and individuals are the ones that change the collective. However, not all individuals in a collective are equal. Spontaneous networks of protest emerge when individuals, by responding to some event, suddenly form a collective. A second example of collective action is the movement to control the FCC. Some individuals created a loose activist structure, and the identity of those who joined the movement and their reasons for joining have a decisive impact on the identity of the collective. This also has implications for movement evolution, something that is understudied in social movement research: the motivations and background of the first individuals that created a collective before it grew big are important but usually not observed.

• Capra: Networked power has existed throughout history, and might be even more representative of the Renaissance and other historical periods than of the network society.

Castells: Networked power is not unique to the network society. All of the four types of power presented above are present in the contemporary period. The important question in that respect is who is included in these networks, and who holds power positions within them. The answer to this question depends on the nature of the particular network, its goals, components, and technology.

• Latour: In the term network power, neither “network” nor “power” is enlightening.  First, he suggested abandoning the concept of power, asking if there is anything that is not power. Second, he pointed to the inflationary, even hegemonic use of the term network today. Latour asserted that because of the traceability of human action today we tend to call every phenomenon network, rather than using traditional categories such as territory, society, macro. In addition, Latour disagreed with Castells about the importance of theory – only theory can give precision to a confused concept of networks.

Castells agreed to disagree completely with Latour. For him, power is not everywhere. It is a fundamental, but particular type of relationship. He also distinguished between power as relational and domination as an institutional concept. In contrast to earlier societies, the core activities of the network society are organized in networks, based on information and communication technology. Therefore, there are quantitative and qualitative differences between contemporary networks and those of other societies and historical periods.

• Fulk: A them of the conference has been that those excluded from networks are less powerful.  Instead, depending on the network, the excluded can have more power than the included, using the examples of small-business and police coordination networks.

Castells acknowledged this as a very relevant point. He stated that the included are more powerful in terms of the program of the network itself. Therefore, criminal networks have no problem in being excluded. A second order analysis of the relationship between networks is important; power resides in those networks that succeed in competition and are able to impose their will onto other networks.

• Grewall: Does it make sense to distinguish between different kinds of programmers and switchers?

Castells agrees that programmers can be switchers and vice versa. Networks operate efficiently once they have a clear goal and program. He pointed to the connections between business and academic networks and how the former influence the latter’s research agenda. Therefore, switchers are important actors in all networks.

• Tongia: What is your opinion regarding the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporations as individuals?

Castells returned to his point that corporations are ultimately run by individuals. He emphasized the connection between collective actors and the individual, which he hopes to connect ultimately to the individual brain.

• Powell: Social scientists until now have been unable to measure power. He expressed his doubts about mashing up network theory and the phenomenon of power. Powell suggested that Castells’ presentation could as well be titled the “technology of power”, and Powell is not sure whether the concept of networks is useful for an analysis of power.

Castells pointed to the transformative role of technology. He proposed a network theory of power in which power ultimately flows through communication networks. The construction of meaning is the most important form of power. For the first time in history, the system of communication networks provides the basis of this construction of meaning in immersive, interactive discourses that shape people’s minds.

Additional reading:

Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

David Singh Grewal

Reported by: Sandi Evans & Anna Li

David Singh Grewal, a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Director of the Biobricks Foundation, is a graduate student at the Harvard University’s Government Department. He studies network power in the context of globalization and is the author of Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (2008).

Grewal began his talk on a tangent discussing how the Biobricks Foundation related to the previous talk on the semantic web. The Biobricks Foundation is a site for the emerging field of synthetic biology, and serves as an online registry for the standardization of biological parts. He described this integration of biological data and metadata as “Web 3.1″ – meaning biopower plus network power. Here, as in the earlier semantic web talks, the issue of privacy loomed large over this potential informational boon, though this topic was not the focus of the rest of this presentation.

Multidimensionality and a historical perspective
Grewal’s starting point consisted of three research questions: 1) what kind of power is at work in the network society? 2) how do networks structure power? 3) do different kinds of networks structure power differently? He then went on to provide a review of literature on network and anthropological theory. Because his presentation was exploratory he elicited and received a great deal of interesting feedback from the audience.

Grewal addressed the methodological argument that a synchronic approach to studying networks provides a single snapshot, and does not measure change over time, which can be considered problematic. By taking a historical perspective he suggests one can analyze networks as processes. Grewal provided a review of literature to support his ideas. First, Grewal discussed various theories of network power. Grewal included his own definition from his book “Network Power” (2008), and emphasized Castells’ (2009) typology: networking power, network power, networked power, and network-making power. Secondly, Grewal addressed a network typology of structures, which included references to Ouchi’s framework on organizational failure (1980), Powell’s (1990) research on network forms of organization, Lipnack and Stamps’ (2000) research on virtual teams, and Ronfeld’s (2006) research on organizational forms. Thirdly, Grewal addressed some anthropological views on networks and related topics such as tribes. He covered the development of tribes, transitions, and concepts of exchanges (reciprocity, redistributive) and related these concepts to communication networks. He also addressed historical models including the ancient, feudal and modern. This broad review of literature was rich in its coverage of conceptualizations about power such as the role of switchers and programmers and their function as the “new citizens” of the network society. He also provided a picture of the modern model where the state has removed the need for hierarchical reciprocity; instead, everybody can be connected through digital technology.

Questions from the audience
Because Grewal’s work was exploratory, the questions and comments from the audience were integral to this talk. Woody Powell suggested that he consider the political, economic and social networks as separate levels, each with its own network structure and then compare them in order to assess issues of power.

Another theoretical question that emerged from the audience was: under what conditions could you predict a major transition in networks? Members of the audience agreed that the focus on networks in transition rather than stages or periodicity was central, though there were many questions about how this question could be studied effectively. One audience member suggested that Grewal consider using cities as a level of analysis because cities, defined as large concentrations of work, could be considered as singular large networks or as a population.

Manuel Castells noted that trying to map out an evolutionary theory of networks was akin to “stepping into a minefield,” but that it was a worthwhile endeavor. He noted that networks need to be put in context in order to observe how they operate, and that the role of technology is integral to the study of networks, particularly in relation to the concept of a Network Society.

Overall, Grewal’s talk brought up several intriguing questions about the role of time and history in network analysis, and he provided a review on both network and anthropological theory.

Additional Readings

Grewal, D. S. (2008). Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization. Yale University Press, 2008.

Nigel Shadbolt

Reported by: Sandi Evans & Jaclyn Selby

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He was a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a joint endeavour between the University of Southampton and MIT, and is a Founding Director and Trustee of the Web Science Trust. He is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation. His current research focuses on developing Web-Based Semantic Technologies.

Nigel Shadbolt spoke about the Semantic Web and the potential for research. The Semantic Web refers to emerging syntax-based architecture that enables the sharing of data on the Web. The Semantic Web is also referred as Linked Data and Web 3.0. The Semantic Web reflects a rich opportunity for researchers because of the potential for access to large amounts of data. Shadbolt also discussed Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), a language used to represent information on the World Wide Web, and Resource Description Framework (RDF), a language connected with W3C.

In his lecture, Shadbolt noted that people developed a ‘romantic’ idea that the Semantic Web would be artificial intelligence (AI) ‘magic.’ It would create “proof and trust” but AI never “had a hope of that.” He felt that people had gotten sidetracked from the point, which is its great potential for information sharing. The Semantic Web, according to Shadbolt, is about moving from a web of documents to “a web of data.” He noted that all HTTP (hyper text transfer protocol) does is put “a thin layer of abstraction onto a hideous web of documents.” It creates physical connections between abstract machines. He cited Web addresses, domain name services, rooting systems and HTML (hyper text markup language) as examples of abstract protocols designed to “sit on top” of a variety of operating systems. What the Semantic Web does is to create a method for abstracting and linking the internal components of this “web of data.” The essential idea, says Shadbolt, is to “give Web addresses to atomic facts.” What we have then is a set of principles for the Semantic Web that developers can then attempt to scale.

Shadbolt brings up a few conceptual problems with the Semantic Web, comparing it to dark matter; it is ‘there’ but we can’t ‘feel’ it. A major difficulty lies in the problem of co-referencing. He notes that although he and Wendy Hall often work together they do not often publish together and thus the Semantic Web as such does not recognize that they are linked. It is thus necessary, argues Shadbolt, to take a closer look at how the Semantic Web is constituted.

Shadbolt discussed the significance of URIs, which are Web-based identifiers providing information about properties, values, objects, and relations (Uniform Resource Identifier, n.d.). Shadbolt defined RDFs as a “knowledge representation language for the Web” that “represents information as sets of triples.” RDF is affiliated with W3C and has become a widely used method for modeling information through syntax formats (Resource Description Framework, n.d.)

Examples of RDF Sites
Shadbolt illustrated his discussion of Linked Data with several examples of current RDF sites. These include DBpedia, SPARQL, SameAs.org, and data.gov.uk. DBpedia is a site that extracts structured information from Wikipedia. It is unique in that it enables new mechanism for navigating, linking to and building upon Wikipedia. According to Shadbolt, DBpedia describes about 3 million pieces of data. It also is an example of triple store technology that enables browsing, navigating and semantic queries.
The UK site, data.gov.uk, is a second example of Linked Data. This site stems from a public service mandate by the UK government to provide open access to much government data, including health, education, crime, transportation and fiscal data. Shadbolt states that this site reflects themes of transparency and citizen engagement.

Opportunities and potential threats
This discussion brought up several opportunities and some potential challenges. Shadbolt stated that there is a need for further research into the “shape and structure” of networks. Nosher Contractor noted that these new forms of large, global data sets are huge opportunities for researchers. Though it may be a challenge to get access to some forms of data, publicly available data from sources like government agencies may be useful. Additionally, as the data.gov.uk site exemplifies, this form of data can act as both a public service and as a means to keep governments accountable by making data accessible and understandable. Arguing that data empowers, Shadbolt used the example of the UK government’s decision to make bike accident data available and the resulting production of accident-avoidance Web applications in under 24 hours. He proposed that similar linked data efforts in Haiti could aid in the coordination of relief efforts. URI, according to Shadbolt, frees data in a way that being “locked up inside spreadsheets or large databases” does not. It is Shadbolt’s conviction that governments “should establish the principle that all public services should publish in reusable form all objective data.”

However, the Semantic Web also brings up issues including privacy and data literacy. Shadbolt noted that although some people may feel comfortable with private firms, for example,  Google managing health records, governments have “a rule and responsibility to the people.” He argues, it is time for the invocation of data portability and transparency. Shadbolt pointed out that the Obama administration has not adopted full data portability, and that if a person visits data.gov.uk they are faced with large downloadable files that may or may not be useful. He is anticipating the creation of semantic.data.gov.

Shadbolt noted also that some governments think that raw data can be too dangerous, and that some data should not be authorized for circulation because people are not data literate and cannot interpret it correctly. He then asked how this is different from the data literacy problems we witness in print media. In terms of data literacy, a seminar participant argued that this form of literacy was necessary to enable people to understand these newly accessible forms of data and metadata. In terms of privacy, one seminar participant asked, what mechanisms exist to balance audience rights with the availability of information? She gave the example of the sex offender database in the U.S., which names offenders and has been controversial for taking away individuals’ privacy without providing enough context about the seriousness of past crimes. Hall responded that the Semantic Web is akin to the World Wide Web of 1994 — it is new, and the rules are still being established. So far, there is no such privacy mechanism yet. Shadbolt also touched upon the issue of granularity in relation to privacy. If Semantic Web networks scale down to the level of the individual level, this further touches upon the issue of privacy.

Additional References

• Freebase.com. http://www.freebase.com/
• HM Government. http://data.gov.uk/
• DBpedia  http://dbpedia.org/About
• Open Street Map. http://www.openstreetmap.org/
• Many Eyes. http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
• Resource Description Framework. Wikipedia.org.     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
• SameAs.org. http://sameas.org/
• Sig Ma. http://sig.ma/
• SPARQL. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
• WC3. http://www.w3.org/
• Web Science Trust. http://webscience.org/trust.html
• Uniform Resource Identifiers. (n.d.). Wikipedia.org.             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier

Wendy Hall, University of Southampton

Reported by: Jaclyn Selby, Youngji Kim & Amanda Beacom

Dame Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science and a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative, now the Web Science Trust (http://webscience.org). Her current research focuses on the Semantic Web and Web science. In her seminar presentation, Professor Hall provided a historical context for online networks, tracing the emergence and growth of the World Wide Web to the current development of the Semantic Web.

Hall began her presentation by discussing how throughout history, people have been writing about linking information and how difficult it is to do. She noted that the brain does this very well and so scholars have sought to develop tools that use the human brain as a model for the organization and management of information. With the creation of increasingly sophisticated machines, people began to think about how machines could be used to create cross-references, links, and associations between related units of information. In 1945, for example, Vannevar Bush, scientific advisor to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, wrote an Atlantic Monthly article titled “As We May Think” which advocated the need for new technologies that use the brain as a model for storing and finding information. This article, which Hall highlighted in her lecture as one of the inspirations for her own work, discusses how a machine could create a system of automatic, “associative indexing,” and uses terms such as “trails” and “web” to describe this system.

Hall described how innovations in computers beginning in the 1960s continued to reference or attempt extensions or augmentations of the human brain. She mentioned her colleague, Ted Nelson, who coined the phrase “everything is deeply intertwingled” to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge. In the 1960s, Ted Nelson first used the terms hypertext and hypermedia and created Xanadu, a hypermedia system; and Douglas Engelbart developed Augment, a project with hypertext features that envisioned the use of computers to enhance intellect. In the 1970s and ‘80s, hypertext systems were further developed in research labs and commercially with the introduction of personal computers. Hall and her colleagues created Microcosm (the Mountbatten Archive Application) in the late 1980s to store information links in databases. These ‘linkbases,’ as she referred to them, were to capture all the relationships between different pieces of information. All the links were triples. Source, destination, scripts. Hall noted that although the Internet existed, there was no real web.  Her hypothesis was that hierarchical indexing is what is necessary to store information.

Apple’s HyperCard became available on Macintosh computers in 1987. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee began development of the World Wide Web to facilitate information sharing among scientists, creating a system of open protocols and universal standards involving Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML). He wrote a paper called “Information Management: A Proposal” and then went on to work on a demo of the ‘World Wide Web’ which he debuted in 1991 to much skepticism. The ACM hypertext conference famously rejected Tim’s paper but by 1993 the idea was widely accepted.  In just a few years, the system became user-friendly with the introduction of the Mosaic, and later the Netscape and Explorer browsers.

After outlining these key historical events, Hall offered some lessons learned in the development of the Web. First, she said, “big is beautiful,” meaning that as Berners-Lee argued, the network is the most important feature of the Web as a hypertext information system. She emphasized that we had lost (for a time) conceptual and contextual linking and that the Web had been “a strangely linkless world” with search engines filling the gap where the missing links were. Other such systems that were developed around the same time as the Web operated on stand-alone workstations, and could be accessed only at those workstations. The Web, in contrast, may be accessed anywhere. Second, “scruffy works,” meaning that the system did not need to be perfect in order to be effective. Links could fail. The third lesson, Hall said, is that “democracy rules.” The Web is based on non-proprietary protocols and universal standards, and demonstrates how everyone has to use such a system, or no one will. Hall points out that ironically, Web search engines such as Google, which are so integral to Web use today, operate in a spirit opposite that of this third lesson. Whereas the Web is an open and transparent system, Google is a closed system with proprietary search algorithms and little transparency. The irony is that when Brinn and Page published their paper on their page ranking algorithm in 1997, they were told it wouldn’t scale.  They had to get financial support and do the math to prove that it would, which they did in 1999. But then they couldn’t make any money so they came up with this idea of auctioning words which turned out to be very successful. One of Hall’s key lessons regarding the rise of Google, which depends on the links we make to make its results more accurate, is that Links equal Power. Ie. if more people point to you than you are rewarded with status you don’t have to pay for.

Hall then described a situation where she asked her students if the Web was truly a hypertext system? Links are unidirectional and don’t point back to where they came from.  However, the World Wide Web was so much better than what came before it that researchers didn’t care and busied themselves exploring “the new universe.”  However, the web did not become a truly ‘social web’ until it completed the transformation from Read Only Web to Read/Write Web.  Hall cites a number of revolutionary social sites (Wikipedia, Galaxy Zoo, Twitter) that are a product of our growing ability to ‘write’ to the web.

The lessons from the development of the Web, of course, also inform the development of the Semantic Web. Hall explained that whereas the Web is built on links between documents, the Semantic Web is built on links between data. This shift from documents to data allows for data re-use, reduces the requirements for human information processing, and releases the large quantity of currently inaccessible data stored in relational databases and Excel spreadsheets by allowing these data to be directly processed by machine. The building blocks of the semantic web are Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which describes and links the data, and which Hall equated to HTML. (Nigel Shadbolt’s seminar lecture, which followed Professor Hall’s, provided additional detail on these concepts.). Hall suggested that the aggregation of all this information in a standard manner might make it possible for people to pose queries to the system such as “where is the best place to study journalism?” and receive structured and useful answers.

Hall posed the question of what will be the tipping points for widespread adoption and use of the Semantic Web. One possible tipping point, she said, is the use of the Semantic Web by governments. Both the administration of U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama have announced initiatives for using the Semantic Web. (See the following sites for more information: http://data.gov.uk/ and http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/19/obama-groundbreaking-use-semantic-web/.)

Hall concluded her talk by introducing the emerging interdisciplinary field of Web science, which she refers to also as part of Web 3.0. She envisions Web science as “a process of creative innovation, design and engineering, the social and the technical, and interpretation and analysis,” and “inter-/multi-/trans-disciplinary”—not the union of disciplines, but their intersection. Understanding the web, according to Hall, is a major challenge as large as any other global cause because nobody (as of yet) owns the web and there are possible scenarios which could end in its demise.  She argued that the field—and the questions it will investigate—matter because the Web has become our cultural legacy and social heritage, and because we cannot afford to take the freedom to exchange information online for granted.

Discussion

Q: What are the limits of the knowledge available online?

A: Aside from some archival data, most information is accessible on the Web.

Q: Is a limitation of the Semantic web its objective view of associations, given that the association one person makes between two pieces of information may differ from the association another person makes, depending on different ontologies?

A: Given that the World Wide Web functions without every link to every document, the Semantic Web should be able to function without all possible associations.

Karine Barzilai-Nahon

Reported by: Amanda Beacom & Cuihua (Cindy) Shen

Karine Barzilai-Nahon is an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School. She studies information policy and politics, particularly information control and gatekeeping, the digital divide, and e-government and e-business in comparative analysis. Recent work has focused on network gatekeeping theory, digital divide metrics, the organizational impact of digital natives, and the development of the concept of “cultured technology” to understand information control in secluded communities.

In her seminar presentation, Professor Barzilai-Nahon used network gatekeeping theory to examine inclusion, exclusion, and power in networks. Network gatekeeping theory, which Barzilai-Nahon has proposed and developed in a series of recent publications, departs from other approaches to information control and gatekeeping in several ways. First, it recognizes three means of exercising power in social networks: (1) decisions; (2) non-decisions; and (3) inactions that shape preferences and awareness. Previous research has emphasized decision-making by elites as a means of exerting power in social interactions. Barzilai-Nahon argues that while decision-making may be an easier mechanism for researchers to observe, non-decisions and the shaping of preferences and awareness are also significant tools for controlling information in networks.

Second, network gatekeeping theory gives equal weight to gatekeepers and the “gated,” which Barzilai-Nahon defines as “the entity subjected to gatekeeping.” In a comprehensive review of gatekeeping theories across a range of scholarly disciplines, Barzilai-Nahon found that most research has focused on the gatekeeper, and little attention has been paid to the concept of the gated. Network gatekeeping theory identifies four attributes of the gated that affect information control in networks: (1) their political power relative to the gatekeeper, an attribute commonly studied in political science; (2) their information production ability, an attribute of traditional interest to economists; (3) their relationships with the gatekeeper, a major focus of social network analysts; and (4) their alternatives in the context of gatekeeping, which is of particular interest to Barzilai-Nahon.

To consider the gated’s alternatives is to acknowledge potential fluidity in the boundaries between gatekeeper and gated in social networks. These fuzzy boundaries are a third distinct feature of network gatekeeping theory. In her seminar presentation, Barzilai-Nahon argued that there is a dynamic flow of power between the identities of the gatekeeper and the gated, and that elite status is transient. According to network gatekeeping theory, a gated actor may become a gatekeeper when the gated possesses the capability to control information and the appropriate social context exists. Gatekeeping is a dynamic status dependent upon social context. Barzilai-Nahon used the example of the Huffington Post to illustrate gatekeeper-gated dynamics. In the social context of its readers, the Huffington Post may be viewed as a gatekeeper of information, but in other contexts, such as that of news sources or of all non-readers, the Huffington Post may be viewed as a gated actor. New information and communication technologies offer novel contexts for gatekeeper-gated dynamics.

Finally, Barzilai-Nahon pointed out that fluidity or fuzziness exists not only in gatekeeper-gated status but also in the broader question of whom or what is included or excluded in social networks. Barzilai-Nahon argued that inclusion/exclusion often reflects self regulation and the social norms of specific contexts. As a member of one network, we may highlight only certain characteristics of ourselves and exclude others. For example, in a professional network, an actor may not discuss a family vacation, whereas in a friend network, an actor may share vacation photos but not work projects. Information control occurs across multiple social dimensions and spheres, and therefore an actor may be included in one social network, and excluded in another, or be a gatekeeper in one network, and the gated in another.

Discussion

• Macy: When it is fuzzy, you throw someone out. So you identify the deviant and exclude them (e.g., trolls in a forum), which help identify the inclusion criteria.
• Capra: Huffington Post only serves as gatekeeper for those who read huffpost. Arianna Huffington already adopted the political culture (selected by the culture as the gatekeeper). She appeals to a certain group and the group selects her. Now she is influencing the group. The gatekeeper emerged. It is not the mob, it is the elite.
• If elites exist ,why would there be the fuzziness of inclusion/exclusion? Because elites would like to dominate, and a lot of self-regulation processes take them to different paths. Unintended outcomes.
• Taplin: There used to be gatekeepers and no alternatives (if movie is made but without a distributor, then the movie doesn’t exist) . Now there are gatekeepers and alternatives. You can put the movie on Youtube. The role of gatekeepers has changed – there are multiple dimensions of power.
• Macy: “never having to say sorry” (love story) is not love, but power. the structure guarantees that it will happen – power.
• Borner: this is an active view of gatekeeping. But there are also passive ways of gatekeeping.
  • Barzilai-Nahon: It’s difficult to operationalize passive gatekeeping. Passive gatekeeping gets to the second dimension of power.
• Tongia – it is interesting to see what is excluded – what is taken out.
• Barzilai-Nahon: Google is a gatekeeper when it exercises info control, but it can be gated in other circumstances (such as in China)
• Butts:  In social network theory, brokerage (Burt’s argument) and exchange theory is very similar to your argument. What you have is equilibrium of gatekeepers in different contexts.  Gatekeeping is a global property, not local property. It also depends on the structure of the network (context) where people are embedded.
• Castells: you are talking about press and internet, this is just one type of gatekeeping. But there are other forms of gatekeeping, like in a club.  Journalists are previously the powerful gatekeepers, but now journlaism crumbles. What is happening is a transformation of gatekeeping, and the gatekeepers. It is still unfolding. We don’t know for sure yet.
• Macy – Nature open review experiment in 2006 is a good example.
• Tongia – am I not the biggest gatekeeper for myself? We tend to look at gatekeepers from the supply side perspective.

Additional readings:

Barzilai-Nahon K. (2009). Gatekeeping: A critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 433-478.

Barzilai-Nahon K. (2008). Towards a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring
information control. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(9),1493-1512.

Yochai Benkler

Reported by: Nina O’Brien, Allie Noyes & Lauren Frank

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field ‘55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, the economic, social, and political roles of commons-based practices in the networked environment, and the emergence of large scale cooperation as a major dimension of social production.

In the second session of the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) conference, Benkler presented his ideas about networks, power and freedom in the digital age.  He began by reviewing different dimensions of power–including political, industrial organization, cultural, institutional design, technical platform design, and social practices and norms.  He posed a series of questions about how power flows differently in the digital age and then framed his focus as exploring how we use the computer-mediated nature of the networked society to make machine observations more complete and refined as a method of studying social relations.

Benkler addressed the changes in legal and organizational power by providing an example of how the network can be used to emphasize counter power (e.g., free music downloads with request for donations).  He suggested that emerging ecosystems based on things like voluntary sites and fan culture may be able to challenge traditional capitalist power structures and destabilize existing categories of power (e.g., consumers vs. producers).  However, as he builds a possible case for the idea that the internet “democratizes,” he also interjects the major waves of criticism of this idea.

The argument for the idea that the internet democratizes is based on the fact that suddenly anyone and everyone has the power to be a “pamphleteer” and to disseminate information widely.  The first generation critique of this argument is based on the issue of fragmentation.  Although anyone can disseminate information, people are consuming information based on personal beliefs and preferences and are no longer confronted with ideas that challenge their point of view.  The second generation critique of the “internet democratizes” idea is related to the power law distribution of links.  It may be possible for anyone to present information to the world vis a vis the internet; however, the vast majority of the information on the internet is never viewed by a substantial audience.

Finally, Benkler reviewed a number of challenges to studying networks, power and freedom in the digital age.  What is the entity of interest?  Is it the blog or perhaps the individual author?  What is the network of interest?  Do blogs and newspapers get combined into one network?  How is it possible to account for diverse structures within a network (e.g., political networks that differ substantially between the left and right)?  What are the limits of network analysis on these questions?  Is is possible to integrate many different kinds of research into network approaches–like qualitative research, text analysis, offline networked power, money and other power systems, and behavioral/brain sciences?

Discussion

• Capra: Multi-dimensional webs are reminiscent of chaos theory which has succeeded in solving equations with variables and producing compact representations of a system.  Have network theorists thought of defining the space of variables?

Benkler: All of this is at an early stage.  Other people can improve upon it with different skill sets.

• Barzilai-Nahon: With bloggers, do we have replication?  Maybe they are not a mob, but instead merging elites in real time.  What do you think?

Benkler: I have had my share of being overly optimistic about the democratizing effect of the web.  By definition, someone who has time online may be elite.  Does it change from a few hundred or thousand people being able to influence the political system to 2-3 million being able to directly affect and a total of 30 million able to indirectly affect? Maybe now being part of the elite makes you part of 20-30% of population, rather than a fraction of a percent.

Barzilai-Nahon: The real question may not be about the numbers but about what it means.  Maybe the number is not important.

• Latour:  There is a vast amount of information available.  Are we talking about scaling up or compounding so many profiles?  Can we go back and forth?  It seems the advantage should be that we can simultaneously look at the whole and zoom in on specific parts.

Benkler:  We may just be using the term “scaling up” differently.  We are scaling up our ability to make subtle judgments that humans can make without the benefit of a machine.  When we zoom back in, we still get a high-resolution image.

Additional Readings:

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale UP.

Noshir Contractor, Peter Monge and Paul Leonardi

Reported by: Nina O’Brien, Allie Noyes & Courtney Schultz

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, translational science and engineering communities, public health networks and virtual worlds.

Peter Monge is Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Management and Organization at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. His most recent book (with Noshir Contractor) is Theories of Communication Networks. He has published theoretical and research articles on organizational communication networks, evolutionary and ecological theory, collaborative information systems, globalization, and research methods.

Paul Leonardi (Ph.D. Stanford University) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, and (by courtesy) Management and Organizations at Northwestern University where he holds the Breed Junior Chair in Design. Paul’s research explores how information technologies and organizations can be simultaneously designed to enhance one another. His work on these topics cuts across the fields of Organization Studies, Communication Studies, and Information Systems and has been published in leading journals in these fields.

In the first session of the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) conference, Noshir Contractor began by presenting two opposing points of view.  The first view is that technology is an exogenous variable that can shape networks. The second view is that networks shape technology so that networks, instead, become the exogenous variable. Contractor explains that even though there are two opposing views, they share something in common – they both see technology and networks as distinct entities. It is important that we, as network scholars, attempt to transcend that view so that technology and networks can be brought together. Two theories where briefly discussed which attempt to accomplish this: actor network theory and the sociomaterial approach.

According to Contractor, including technology in networks is a useful step to address many of the challenges researchers currently face. First, in addition to people, nodes could also include things such as documents or computer programs. When the types of nodes change, so do the relationships between these nodes.  People can be friends with each other, but in all likelihood they would not consider themselves friends with their database.  Taken together, this shift would create networks with many different types of nodes and many different types of relationships between those nodes. The question he asks is: Can existing network approaches represent this conceptual shift?

Paul Leonardi then presented a case study that serves as an example of a multidimensional network.  The case focused on engineers who do computer models of crash tests for a car manufacturer.  One engineer developed a computer program to assist with the analysis of the crash test models.  Leonardi described the diverse range of network ties that initially led to the dissemination of the computer program.  Initially when people began to use this new program, they continued to seek advice from other people (i.e., experts) about how to analyze crash test models, but eventually as people became familiar with the program, they started using the program itself as an “expert” in the process of figuring out how to analyze crash test models.  The technology actually became a node in the network.  If it was analyzed only as an influence on the network of human relationships, the nature of the network would be distorted.  The multidimensional perspective allows quantitative network methods to more accurately explore the kinds of complex relationships that are typically left to qualitative ethnographic research.

Discussion:

• Wendy Hall: Consider Implications, for example Google Buzz automatically generated networks for individuals based on their  frequency of email with contacts. This has had some terrible consequences and has been a real privacy problem — they have had to scale it back.
  • The Google Buss issue raises a bigger question: who gets to set the rules? Is the policy an opt-out or an opt-in?
• John Taplin: Question for Paul: before JWIN was introduced there were people identified as experts who were called upon, and they slowly become replaced with technology and the network. What happens to the social relations of those people who used to be the go-to experts
  • Paul Leonardi: Response to JT: expertise isn’t always singular — people may have multiple expertise. As well engineers were often getting dumb questions or practical questions (i.e. how do I use this tool in this context) rather than substantive questions about the “why.”
• Ernie Wilson: How would the model respond if instead of losing connections in one sphere and picking it up in others, we consider the ways in which power changes over time, eg, does individual status change over time?
• Karine Barzilai-Nahon: Not sure this model does account for power relations — it illuminates different relationships, but doesn’t really get at power, per se
• Woody Powell: This case study is lovely because it clearly demonstrates the logic, but scaling up may be premature — we want the specific case to illuminate whether relations change “on the ground”
• David Graywell: Why is technology here represented as a node rather then a linking connetion? What is the value of separating them out as nodes?
  • Response: consider biological networks: it is often useful to distinguish between patterns of organizations and biological structures. Structure os an embodiment of particular relations
  • Yochai Benkler: My take was that this was about working with general purpose tools for dealing with theoretically generated claims about human relations
  • Michael Macy: To the question of whether the nodes have to be motivated or if they can be artifacts, CMC research demonstrates why. A nice metaphor is of two people crashing their cars. That interaction is mediated by the materials of the car they are driving
• Carter Butts: To describe things completely you need lots of variables, but there’s a danger of being overrun by the proffered complexity. a theoretical challenge is to have the development of the models keep pace with theoretical objects. There is a limit on the utility of additional complexity.
• Lada Adamic: How can we do different things with the data than we were able to do before, substantively? Or do we have to reduce things down to crunch the data anyway, in which case we would be comparing more of the same kinds of things?
• Response: Noshir Contractor: in this case the JT node becomes more central, and here it is obvious in a way that would not otherwise be as clear. You can specify the logic of attraction. The real advantage is that you can see those configurations and determine if they are more frequent than random.
• Response to the power questions raised by Wilson and Taplin: marginalization in the network is a distinct possibility — though those marginalized people would show up, perhaps as isolates, so the model does capture that to some extent.
• Paul Leonardi: How can we map these relationships? If you’re interested in power, you can ask those questions too — the advantage of the ethnographic sample is that we have the opportunity to learn what is important to the individuals in the network. That drove the decision about how to model it. That is a really important concern in scaling up to larger networks — how can you keep that kind of specificity alive?
• Is a certain measure an indicator of power,  or is power a relation?

Additional Readings:

Monge, P. R., & Contractor, N. S. (2003). Theories of communication networks. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Leonardi, P.M., & Bailey, D. (2008). Transformational Technologies and the Creation of New Work Practices: Making Implicit Knowledge Explicit in Task-based Offshoring. MIS Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 159-176.

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)

From News Dots:

“Like Kevin Bacon’s co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.”

Noshir Contractor, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, talks about his research on social networks. Nosh is the director of the SONIC network research center, which has partnered with ANN to study scientific collaboration in virtual teams.

(via the Center for Internet Research)

From the article:

“The system is designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network, its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.

Without another way of collaborating, the TISC platform has become one of the de facto standards for communication among the relief effort in Haiti.There are more than 1700 different users in Haiti, most of them relief organizations of various size and specialty looking for how to get involved, and to coordinate efforts to maximize results. It’s operating on a larger scale than DISA had originally planned, but it’s scaling well, says Jean Dumay, one of DISA’s leads on the TISC project. “The test came early, and it became very real, but we were ready for it.”

Sinan Aral, Lev Muchnik andArun Sundararajan

ABSTRACT:

“Node characteristics and behaviors are often correlated with the structure of social networks over time. While evidence of this type of assortative mixing and temporal clustering of behaviors among linked nodes is used to support claims of peer influence and social contagion in networks, homophily may also explain such evidence. Here we develop a dynamic matched sample estimation framework to distinguish influence and homophily effects in dynamic networks, and we apply this framework to a global instant messaging network of 27.4 million users, using data on the day-by-day adoption of a mobile service application and users’ longitudinal behavioral, demographic, and geographic data. We find that previous methods overestimate peer influence in product adoption decisions in this network by 300–700%, and that homophily explains 50% of the perceived behavioral contagion. These findings and methods are essential to both our understanding of the mechanisms that drive contagions in networks and our knowledge of how to propagate or combat them in domains as diverse as epidemiology, marketing, development economics, and public health.”

Author: Matthew E., Brashears

Source: Social Networks, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 22 January 2010 (URL)

Abstract: This article evaluates the Durkheim/Berger argument that integration in a network of co-religionists protects against anomia. The 1985 General Social Survey network instrument is used to evaluate the effect of integration on anomia and the probability of unhappiness. Results indicate that contact with religiously homogeneous others paired with personal religious belief reduces anomia and the likelihood of unhappiness. Additionally, while ego/alter closeness is important, alter/alter closeness is not. These results suggest that individuals benefit from religious association more so than religious community. Additional analyses indicate that these results are unlikely to be due to homophily.

Yuan, Y. Connie,  Fulk, Janet,  Monge, Peter R.,  Contractor, Noshir

Communication Research 2010 37: 20-47

Just out in the new issue of Communication Research – an article combining social psychology and social network theory to explore transactive  memory processes.

Communication Research

Article abstract:
“Building on Kozlwoski and Klein’s emergence framework, this research developed and tested a set of multilevel hypotheses regarding individual and team transactive memory processes in work teams. Literature from social psychology suggested hypotheses on how shared task interdependence influences individual expertise exchange. Social network theory suggested hypotheses that individual expertise exchange is channeled according to communication tie strength. Using data collected from 218 individuals from 18 organizational teams, the proposed hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear modeling techniques. The results showed that at the individual level the relationship between directory development and expertise exchange was mediated by communication tie strength and moderated by shared task interdependence.Team-level variables also were significantly related to individual-level outcomes such that individual expertise exchange happened more frequently in teams with well-developed team-level expertise directories, as well as with higher team communication tie strength and shared task interdependence.”

Elsevier

The Social Networks journal has published the first of its two special issues on network dynamcis: Dynamics of Social Networks edited by Patrick Doreian, Tom A.B. Snijders.

From the editors:

“This journal issue contains the first of two connected special issues on Dynamics of Social Networks. This second special issue will appear later this year. For a rather long time, attention to dynamic aspects in Social Network Analysis took the form of descriptive studies. However, over the last fifteen years model-based approaches to studying network change have been flowering. Landmarks were three special issues on Network Evolution of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology, edited by Frans Stokman and Patrick Doreian, in 1996 (with a book version: Doreian and Stokman, 1997 In: P. Doreian and F.N. Stokman, Editors, Evolution of Social Networks, Gordon and Breach Publishers, Amsterdam (1997).Doreian and Stokman, 1997), 2001, and 2003. These three special issues demonstrated how formal and statistical modeling and empirical analysis were coming together. The 2001 and 2003 special issues were focused on joining of theoretical developments with the analysis of empirical data using advanced modeling. This special issue presents a continuation of jointly using theories and modeling to understand social network phenomena.”

Facebook Fellowship Program

Every day Facebook confronts the most complex technical problems and we believe that close relationships with the academy will enable us to address many of these problems at a fundamental level and solve them. As part of our ongoing commitment to academic relations, we are pleased to announce the creation of the Facebook Fellowship program to support graduate students in the 2010-2011 school year.

We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including the following topical areas:

* Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
* Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
* Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
* Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
* Systems: hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
* Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval

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• Facebook Announces Ph.D. Fellowship Program (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook funding Ph.D fellowships (sfgate.com)

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• The Republic of Letters, Visualized as Social Networks (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
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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)

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

“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

“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

 “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

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/

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.

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.”

CMU CASOS

The CASOS center at Carnegie Mellon University released new versions of their network analysis tools *ORA and Automap.

New features of *ORA include improved coordination between components, a Word  Cloud generator, improved support for foreign languages and Geospatial reporting.

The text mining tool Automap has an improved user interface and better text extracting capabilities.

Paper abstract:

“Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains including job performance, mental health, sports, business, and combat. Many authors have suggested that overconfidence–defined here as believing you are better than you are in reality–is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, resolve, morale, persistence, and/or the bluffing of opponents. However, too much overconfidence can cause arrogance, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters, and wars, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing accurate beliefs. Here, we present an evolutionary model that shows overconfidence actually maximizes individual fitness and populations will tend to become overconfident, as long as the resources at stake during conflicts exceed twice the cost of competition. This is because overconfident individuals make more challenges when there is uncertainty about the strength of opponents (and thus the outcome of conflicts), while less confident individuals shy away from many conflicts they would win. Where the value of a prize is at least twice the cost of trying, overconfidence is the best strategy. The model suggests that the conditions under which humans would have evolved to have a “rational” unbiased view of their own capabilities are exceedingly rare, and it helps to explain why resource-rich environments can paradoxically create more conflict. Moreover, the fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable may be one reason why overconfidence persists today in politics, business, and finance, even if it causes occasional disasters.”

Elsevier’s Social Networks journal has published a corrected proof of a paper written by Uwe Matzat and Chris Snijders comparing the quality of ego-network data collected online vs. offline.

Elsevier

Paper abstract:

“We analyze whether differences in kind and quality of ego-centered network data are related to whether the data are collected online or offline. We report the results of two studies. In the first study respondents could choose between filling out ego-centered data through a web questionnaire and being probed about their network in a personalized interview. The second study used a design in which respondents were allocated at random to either online or offline data collection. Our results show that the data quality suffers from the online data collection and the findings indicate that this is the consequence of the respondents answering “mechanically”. We conclude that network researchers should avoid to simply copy traditional network items into a web questionnaire. More research is needed about how new design elements specific for web questionnaires can motivate respondents to fill out network questions properly.”

Informaworld

In the last  issue of Communication Monographs Frank Tutzauer and  Benjamin Elbirt propose a new measure of centralization for networks characterized by path-transfer processes.

From the authors:

“This article proposes a new measure of network centralization and reports the results of a simulation designed to determine the sampling distribution of the proposed measure.
The measure is based on the information-theoretic concept of entropy and is appropriate for those networks in which traffic flows over paths and propagates by means of transference.Tables of critical values are constructed which allow the researcher to conduct tests of significance.”

“The structure of the paper is as follows: First, the example networks used in this article will be described. Following an overview of some of the key developments in the centrality and centralization literature, including Borgatti’s (2005) taxonomy, pathtransfer processes will be modeled stochastically and the centrality measure appropriate for such processes will be reviewed. This actor-based measure of centrality will then be used to construct a network-based measure of centralization. Next, a simulation will be conducted that will allow the constuction of tables of critical values.  Finally, the critical-value tables will be applied to the illustrative networks and a few concluding thoughts will be offered.”

From the introduction of the issue (Wolfram Kaiser):

Journal of Public Policy

“Given its complex multilevel governance structures, the European Union (EU) is an obvious focus for studying policy networks as informal coordination mechanisms between state and non-state or public and private actors. The importance of this research field has increased exponentially with the EU’s spatial expansion, its institutional deepening, its forays into new policy areas and its growing role as an international actor. Research on policy networks at first focussed on analysing changes in national political systems and policy-making in particular policy fields. This approach is now being applied more systematically and comprehensively to understanding the transformation of EU governance during the last decade.

[…] In analysing the role of policy networks in the EU, the contributors to this special issue do not take a simple pro or con position in the debate about whether networks play an important role in governance or constitute a new form of governance. In fact, the structures, activities and functions of networks in the EU appear to vary too much to allow for such sweeping generalisations. Collectively, the papers endorse theoretical and methodological pluralism and stay away from grand meta-theoretical battles. Instead, the special issue combines articles utilizing quantitative, formal social network analysis and more descriptive qualitative approaches to understanding different dimensions of networked European politics and transdisciplinary collaboration embracing both historical and contemporary analysis of EU governance.”

“Several sociology studies, some going back decades, point to this proximity or “distance” effect. In Sacerdote’s own research, he studied e-mail exchanges among students on his campus. The e-mails were stripped of personal identification and content, as he was only looking to analyze the volume of e-mails.”

To see the full story, click here.

From the publisher’s  description:

Manuel Castells

We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.

Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment.

His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China.

In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging – “mass self-communication” – politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world. Deeply researched, far-reaching in scope, and incisively argued, this is a book for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics and character of the modern world.

Communication Power

“How could Manuel Castells have predicted that now is the time of the perfect storm? I do not know. But I do know that his new book coincides with the largest downturn in global economies since the 1930s, with the most important American election since the 1960s, with a most radical transformation of world politics in many generations, and with the most profound reevaluation of the lives of modern citizens, from what they value to how they communicate. We have become used to Castells’ careful scholarship and penetrating analyses but in this new book he cuts deeper into the heart of the matter. Sometimes he provides illuminating answers and where he cannot, he frames the questions that must be answered. This is a powerful and much needed book for a world in crisis.”
–Antonio Damasio

“Manuel Castells unites the mind of a social scientist with the soul of an artist. His trilogy took us to the edge of the millennium. This book takes us beyond to the critical crossroads of the 21st century, where technology, communication, and power converge.”
–Rosalind Williams, Director, Program on Science, Technology and Society, MIT

Harvard Networked Governance

“The idea for this special issue arose in conjunction with the first conference on “Networks in Political Science,” held at Harvard University, June 13-14, 2008. The conference was cochaired by David Lazer of Harvard University and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and supported with a grant from the National Science Foundation, with John Scholz of Florida State University as the principal investigator. [...] This special issue publishes eight of the best articles from the conference that focused on American politics.”

Doyne Farmer, Duncan Foley (2009), Nature

From the article :

Image: Nature

” The best models they have are of two types, both with fatal flaws. Type one is econometric: empirical statistical models that are fitted to past data. These successfully forecast a few quarters ahead as long as things stay more or less the same, but fail in the face of great change. Type two goes by the name of ‘dynamic stochastic general equilibrium’. These models assume a perfect world, and by their very nature rule out crises of the type we are experiencing now.”

“There is a better way: agent-based models. An agent-based model is a computerized simulation of a number of decision-makers (agents) and institutions, which interact through prescribed rules. The agents can be as diverse as needed — from consumers to policy-makers and Wall Street professionals — and the institutional structure can include everything from banks to the government. Such models do not rely on the assumption that the economy will move towards a predetermined equilibrium state, as other models do. Instead, at any given time, each agent acts according to its current situation, the state of the world around it and the rules governing its behaviour.”

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailona (2009), Social networks

Links play a twofold role on the web: they open the channels through which users access information, and they determine the centrality of sites and their visibility. This paper adds two factors to the analysis of links that aim to draw a parallel between the web and other offline interorganisational networks: the resources that the organisations publishing online are able to mobilise, and the status or public recognition of those organisations. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are used to analyse a sample of the web of about one thousand sites, showing that both the economic resources of the producers of the sites (a proxy to their wider pool of resources) and their presence in traditional news media (a proxy to their status) significantly increase their probability of receiving more links, and therefore, their centrality. This adds a sociologically relevant dimension to the analysis of the web that has been disregarded so far but that is crucial to understand the way it distributes visibility.

Science - Complexity cover

The issue description from Science:

In the 24 July 2009 issue, Science highlights how network analysis is allowing us to understand how the world works from new vantage points. Perspective articles examine the foundations of network analysis and its applications across disciplinary fields from economics to ecology; News stories look at the use of network tools to study social phenomena; and a Review article explains how molecular biologists are using networks to analyze basic cellular circuitry. Science Careers highlights careers in network science and the 28 July issue of Science Signaling delves into the dynamics of cell signaling networks.

THAT Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?”

Read more in The Economist.

Huisman, M. (2009), Journal of Social Structure, 10(1).

Analysis of social network data is often hampered by non-response and missing data. Recent studies show the negative effects of missing actors and ties on the structural properties of social networks. This means that the results of social network analyses can be severely biased if missing ties were ignored and only complete cases were analyzed. To overcome the problems created by missing data, several treatment methods are proposed in the literature: model-based methods within the framework of exponential random graph models, and imputation methods. In this paper we focus on the latter group of methods, and investigate the use of some simple imputation procedures to handle missing network data. The results of a simulation study show that ignoring the missing data can have large negative effects on structural properties of the network. Missing data treatment based on simple imputation procedures, however, does also have large negative effects and simple imputations can only successfully correct for non-response in a few specific situations.

Pamela E. Carter, Gina Green(2009), Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. Pages 105-109.

David Ronfeldt and Danielle Varda (2009), Social Science Research Network.

The deepening of the information age will alter the nature of the state so thoroughly that something new emerges: cyberocracy. While it is too early to say precisely what a cyberocracy will look like, the outcomes will include new kinds of democratic, totalitarian, and hybrid governments, along with new kinds of state-society relations. Thus, optimism about the information revolution should be tempered by an anticipation of its potential dark side. This paper reiterates the view of the cyberocracy concept as first stated in 1992, and then offers a postscript for 2008. It speculates that information-age societies will develop new sensory apparatuses, a network-based social sector, new modes of networked governance, and ultimately the cybercratic nexus-state as a successor to the nation-state.

Srikanth Paruchuri (2009)Organization science, Published online before print January 22, 2009.

This paper proposes that a mechanism through which a firm’s location in the interorganizational network influences the firm’s internal innovation activities is modifying the amount of information flowing within the firm. Exploring a firm’s internal innovation activities, I hypothesized that structural centrality of an inventor in the intrafirm co-inventing network is associated with her impact on her firm’s innovation activities in an inverted-U-shape relation. I further hypothesized that this relationship is moderated by the firm’s centrality and span of structural holes in the interfirm network. I found strong support for these hypotheses in a longitudinal study of eight large pharmaceutical firms. The findings in this paper, apart from having managerial implications, have implications for research on alliances, network studies, and innovation processes.

Andrew V. Shipilov (2009), Organization Science, January-February 2009; 20: 85 – 106.

This study investigates characteristics that affect the relationship between firms’ positions in a network of collaborative ties with other firms and their performance. Firms located in similarly structured networks rich in structural holes may obtain different performance results depending on their (1) capacity to absorb heterogeneous information, (2) ability to protect against partner noncooperation, and (3) bargaining power. In this paper, I argue that firms with a wide scope of experience have superior absorptive capacity for dealing with heterogeneous information; hence, such firms will be able to extract performance improvements from network positions rich in structural holes. Furthermore, firms with a high level of historic multimarket contact (MMC) with their partners are able to reduce the risks of partner noncooperation, hence augmenting their performance compared to firms in open networks that do not enjoy MMC with their own partners. Finally, firms of low centrality in the industry’s network of alliances will extract performance benefits from enhancing bargaining power as a result of exploiting brokerage opportunities in open networks. These arguments are corroborated in a study of relationships formed among investment banks’ advising on the merger and acquisition transactions in the United Kingdom between 1992 and 2001.

The emerging Web of Data utilizes the web infrastructure to represent and interrelate data. The foundational standards of the Web of Data include the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). URIs are used to identify resources and RDF is used to relate resources. While RDF has been posited as a logic language designed specifically for knowledge representation and reasoning, it is more generally useful if it can conveniently support other models of computing. In order to realize the Web of Data as a general-purpose medium for storing and processing the world’s data, it is necessary to separate RDF from its logic language legacy and frame it simply as a data model. Moreover, there is significant advantage in seeing the Semantic Web as a particular interpretation of the Web of Data that is focused specifically on knowledge representation and reasoning. By doing so, other interpretations of the Web of Data are exposed that realize RDF in different capacities and in support of different computing models.