While talking to a friend recently I realized that when one says “social networks” nowadays people immediately think that you are talking about sites like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc. While these “social networking sites” can be analyzed much as any other social network, they are really just the tip of the iceberg.

A social network simply defined is the set of relationships among a group of people. Nodes represent people and the lines between them represents a specific relationship between those people: friendships, coworkers, family members, etc. The important aspect of social networks, and social network analysis is the relationships - by studying the pattern of relationships between people you can learn something about the people involved.

What I am doing on this site and in my work is taking the general principles of networks, moving out from person-to-person social networks and applying the analysis to global networks of people, nations, industries, cultural influences, etc to get a better insight into global issues.

At least that is one ingredient of my thinking here, and something that I believe is a very powerful tool.

While personal social networks have been a favorite application of network analysis, networks share some basic principles. Whether we are talking about molecular structures, nervous systems, social cliques or world trade(Duncan Watts’ book Six Degrees gives an excellent account of this) there are certain principles such as diffusion that can be generalized to all types of networks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.