Howard Rheingold's Library tagged networks →  View Popular

"In the opening keynote, “Networked Learners,” Lee Rainie discusses the latest findings of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project about how teenagers and young adults have embraced technology of all kinds — including broadband, cell phones, gaming devices and MP3 players. He describes how technology has affected the way “digital natives” search for, gather and act on information."

www.pewinternet.org/...52-Networked-Learners.aspx - Preview

networks learning digital_natives search

"One interesting tidbit I learned is that idiot is derived from the Greek idiotes, which originally referred to a person who did not participate in the political or public life of the polis, or Greek city-state--in other words, someone who lived an individual life, unconcerned with larger affairs. Apparently, the Greeks looked back at the classical era as a golden age in which people were involved in civic affairs, and they viewed the development of the individual as decadent."

karlboyken.blogspot.com/...idiotes-and-idiocracy.html - Preview

networks public_sphere civic_engagement

"In the World According to Twitter, giving away access to information rewards the giver by building followers. The more followers, the more information comes to the giver to distribute, which in turn builds more followers. The process cannot be commanded or controlled; followers opt in and out as they choose. The results are transparent and purely quantitative; network size is all that matters. Networks of this sort are self-organizing and democratic but without any collective interaction.

The significance of Twitter is yet to be determined; it is a simple, impersonal, and transient application of technology. But very real network effects are a new source of power in and around organizations.

America in the 20th century was called a "society of organizations." Formal hierarchies with clear reporting relationships gave people their position and their power. In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable. "

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...power-to-the-connectors.html - Preview

twitter networks social_networks

"And some, a few, are trying to think through a new model for business, reconstructed around what we have learned in the open web, balanced with what we know about the conduct of business. A new hybrid, intentionally devised to keep the best of the old (or at least the parts that will still work) and fuse that with the new, social models that dominate the web revolution.

From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren't really designed to do one thing, like a cog in a watch. They have various relationships with other people, and through these relationships they have influence on the work going on all around them. They are not alone, like a moth in a bell jar. We are not alone, in our work. Even the most repetitive of work -- screwing bolts on an assembly line, or delivering the mail -- happens in the context of other people, and is made more valuable by their exertions.

Increasingly, people's work is being viewed as a shared aspect of social relations. Time is a shared space, where we cooperate toward shared ends.

One casualty of this large-scale shift in business doctrine may be the hallowed business process. The notion of a process -- a defined series of steps in the production of goods or the delivery of services -- subordinates individuals to the their roles in the process.

For decades, business planners have made a distinction between repetitive, lock-step processes, where very little variability is involved (think pharmacy), and more free-form, unstructured processes where a higher degree of variability is expected (think emergency room). Taking the abstraction of a process out of the world of chemistry, manufacturing, and logistics, and treating the people involved as so many chemicals, gears, or trucks seemed like a good idea in the past, but is not going to be workable, going forward.

We will have to devise a new, richer way to think about people's interactions -- via social networks -- and our connection to mechanical processes and devices."

www.stoweboyd.com/...tworks-the-end-of-process.html - Preview

networks social_media social_networks

This article deals with an emerging type of social capital which is labeled as ‘network capital’. It is formed from collaborative practices emerging from e-enabled human networks. It is proposed that network capital is a specific type of social capital in

ci-journal.net/...317 - Preview

social_software social_capital social_networks networks

"The term “power law” has a much more specific meaning to those that follow such things. In general, a power law defines when the frequency of an event decreases faster than the increasing size of the event. The classical example is that an earthquake twice as large is four times as rare. Power laws are found throughout nature and human environments and are an active area of scientific research that have attracted widespread interest.

However, the list below is more informal and though a number of power laws are on the list, I’m using the term merely to imply that these principles and relationships drive directly to the heart of way network-based social systems function. There are two components at interplay here: the network and us. The way they interact and entangle is what is increasingly both interesting and important to the knowledge economy. "

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe - Preview

networks

"“Working Wikily” is a phrase that the Monitor Institute team coined (with a little alliterative assistance from our friend Lucy Bernholz) to describe the new ways that people are applying network theory and networked technology to do the work they’ve always done in a more collaborative form and also to begin working in new ways altogether."

workingwikily.net/?page_id=149 - Preview

wiki collaboration networks

"A young professor at UC-Berkeley, AnnaLee Saxenian, wrote a book in 1994 which answers this question. At a time when Boston still thought it was the powerhouse of the tech industry, Saxenian declared Boston the loser in the tech race and explained why it would only fall further behind. This book was titled Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. It kicked off a firestorm of criticism from the Boston elite. Saxenian also alienated friends at her alma mater, MIT.

She noted that Silicon Valley had an amazing dynamism about it. There were extensive professional networks, job hopping was the norm, information was exchanged openly, and the culture encouraged risk taking. The Silicon Valley ecosystem supported entrepreneurial experimentation and collective learning. In other words, Silicon Valley was a very open network—a giant social networking site working in analog before the concept of such a thing even existed."

www.techcrunch.com/...-bostons-route-128-in-the-dust - Preview

networks social_networks technology innovation

Computer networks are social networks. Social affordances of computer supported social networks--broader bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, personalization--are fostering the movement from door-to-door and place-to-place communities to person-to-person and role-to-role communities. People connect in social networks rather than in communal groups. In-person and computer-mediated communication are integrated in communities characterized by personalized networking.
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www.chass.utoronto.ca/...ijurr3a1.htm - Preview

social_networks sociology online_community networks

"Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localized positions) within social space. We argue for more research on: (a) the basic ecological processes that link organizations, associations, cultural communities, social movements, and many other social forms; (b) the impact of multiplex ties on the patterns of homophily; and (c) the dynamics of network change over time through which networks and other social entities co-evolve."

arjournals.annualreviews.org/...annurev.soc.27.1.415 - Preview

social_networks networks

"This course contains multiple exercises that address different aspects of complex networks. These are:

* Introduction to Networks (below): a prerequisite to the remaining exercises, introducing basic aspects of network construction and traversal.
* Small World Networks: explores the statistics of path lengths in random networks, and the importance of a small number of long-range shortcuts in creating small worlds.
* Percolation: explores the connectivity of random networks on regular lattices, and the universality of critical behavior near the percolation transition.
* Exploration of network growth, structure, etc. "

pages.physics.cornell.edu/...NetworksExercise.html - Preview

networks

"Renowned scientists Christakis and Fowler present compelling evidence for our profound influence on one another's tastes, health, wealth, happiness, beliefs, even weight, as they explain how social networks form and how they operate."

www.connectedthebook.com - Preview

networks social_networks

"Asterisq just released Mentionmap, an exciting web app for exploring your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they're talking about. It's also a great way to find relevant people to follow."

asterisq.com/...witter-network-with-mentionmap - Preview

twitter networks visualization social_networks

"The media landscape has changed dramatically in recent decades, from one predominated by traditional mass communication formats to today's more personalized network environment. Mobile communication plays a central role in this transition, with adoption rates that surpass even those of the Internet. This essay argues that the widespread diffusion and use of mobile telephony is iconic of a shift toward a new 'personal communication society', evidenced by several key areas of social change, including symbolic meaning of the technology, new forms of coordination and social networking, personalization of public spaces, and the mobile youth culture. The conclusion speculates on future trends in the sociotechnological climate."

www3.interscience.wiley.com/...abstract - Preview

networks social_networks mobile_devices digital_natives media

Poring through the meticulous records of the Framingham Heart Study, conducted from 1948 to the present in a small Massachusetts city, Christakis and Fowler mapped out the relationship of 12,067 people with more than 50,000 ties (or connections between friends and relatives) among them. Analyzing the network, the authors noticed that obese people tend to be friends with other obese people, while thin people tend to be friends with other thin people. On one level, this is obvious and unsurprising; birds of a feather and all that. But based on their reading of the data (which some other researchers have questioned), the authors concluded that the relationship was causal: being associated with overweight people, even indirectly, is likely to make you overweight.

As Christakis and Fowler (along with other researchers) have found, obesity spreads by contagion. So if your friend’s friend’s friend — whom you’ve never met, and lives a thousand miles away — gains weight, you’re likely to gain weight, too. And if your friend’s friend’s friend loses weight, you’re likely to lose weight, too.

www.nytimes.com/...Stossel-t.html - Preview

networks

Examining years of research of their own and from others, the authors conclude that social networks, both offline and online, are crucial in understanding everything from voting patterns to the spread of disease.

People have profound influences on each other's behavior within three degrees of separation, the authors find. That means that your friends, your friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends may all affect your eating habits, voting preferences, happiness, and more. At the fourth degree, however, the influence substantially weakens.

edition.cnn.com/...index.html - Preview

networks social_networks

"I had been told that all this stuff on increasing returns was “theoretical.” Then I was talking about it in Santa Fe to some students and was walking to give my lecture and I had a complete epiphany. I thought, this isn't esoteric stuff, angels on pins. This applies to all of hi-tech. I began to realize that all of hi-tech operated according to increasing returns, which meant actually that the more a firm like Microsoft got ahead of the market, the more its brand would be out there, the more money it would have to parlay into the next thing. The more Google gets prominent as a search engine and the more people get used to using Google, the more omnipresent Google becomes. Other search engines get pushed aside, like Ask.com or Alta Vista. But you can't predict in advance which one it might be.

Suddenly I realized that there was a dynamic with hi-tech or Silicon Valley, and with hi-tech all over the US, that markets within hi-tech tended to tilt or tip into the dominance of one player. Hi-tech has what came to be known as "network effects": the more people that use Google, the more likely they are to use Google. This has huge up-front effects. Take Microsoft. They used to give you Windows on one of these little disk things, but the first copy of Windows — NT or, Windows 2000, or whatever it would be these days — might cost Microsoft something like $2 billion. The next copy might cost them fractions of a cent. So their costs would very rapidly go down per unit the more they get out there. Hi-tech has this. But this is not true for dog food. The next unit of dog food costs per unit just about as much as the first one.

Ideas operate very much according to increasing returns. It's costly for someone to dream them up and almost free for anyone to distribute them. It turns out that information is virtually free and we are seeing, as the economy runs more and more on ideas rather than on bulk commodities such as processed corn, processed iron ore, steel, or cars, we have different rules. Increasing rather than diminish

www.edge.org/...edge301.html - Preview

networks knowledge

Michael Schrage recently wrote a post on this site about the importance of forwarding information as a way to enhance network relationships. He's right about this, although the title — "The Disadvantage of Twitter and Facebook" — is misleading (and inaccurate, since people retweet things all the time — but sadly, editors know that anything with Facebook and Twitter in the title gets a lot of page views and retweets). Forwarding is the new networking. The fact that you can't do it easily on Facebook is about as relevant as the inability to do it over the telephone or the Dictaphone.

OK, it's not really the new networking, since it's been going on for more than a decade now. Smart networkers saw early on that forwarded email content was a way to nurture network relationships.

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...rding_is_the_new_networki.html - Preview

networks

Why does a debate about whether community exists persist, when the reality of community pervades our existence? Remember the timeless British music hall lament: "Things ain't wot they used to be"? Contemporary urbanites perversely flatter themselves by remarking how well they are coping with stressful modern times in contrast to the easy life their ancestors led. They look back to bygone, supposedly golden days when they are sure that their ancestors — twenty, one hundred, three hundred years ago — led charmed lives, basking in the warmth of true solidary community. I suspect that at all times, most people have feared that communities had fallen apart around them, with loneliness and alienation leading to a war of all against all.

www.chass.utoronto.ca/...in.htm - Preview

networks community social_networks sociology

Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.

The book will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

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networks