Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
-
After you get the a few leads, this is what you do:
Get a CV: The best way to get a CV or list of publications is, imho, to google “[name of professor] department” or “[name of prof] professor department”. Googling for ‘CV’ will get you the CVs of everyone whose committee your prof was on. Googling ‘anthropology’ won’t work because often these people aren’t in anthropology departments. Sometimes ‘professor’ won’t work for non-US schools because they might be ‘senior lecturers’ or something like that.
Download Orgy: download every article and publication, conference paper and report. Often the shorter informal pieces are better because they get to the point quickly and give you a sense of the person. This phase is enjoyable because you have the illusion of making progress merely by right-clicking. Find everything. The more obscure the better. Never give up, never surrender.
book review of The Exploit: a Theory of Networks
-
To understand what went wrong, let's look at three distinct ways that the term network is used in the literature. (See Milton Mueller's excellent book Networks and States for more on how the term is used in different ways.)
-
In network analysis, a network is a set of nodes (units) connected by links or edges. Since this is a form of analysis, anything can be considered a node - an academic paper (linked via citations), a set of phones (linked by wires and switches), a group of people (linked by communication lines), you name it. As long as the units are consistent and the links are identifiable, you can perform a network analysis. That doesn't mean that the phenomenon you're studying is a network in an objective sense.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
"I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity.
It is a situation of false harmony. One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more an indicator of increasing wariness. You never know which world your world will collide with next, with what consequences. You never know what missed opportunity or threat could decisively impact your life."
-
But today, one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context.
Let’s say you’re an administrative assistant at a university, have an associate’s degree, and frequent a coffeeshop where the barista is a graduate student. You both shop at Whole Foods. She’s trading up, as far as dietary lifestyles go, to shop at Whole Foods, while it is normal for you because you have a higher household income.
In the coffeeshop, you’re higher status as customer. If you run into each other at Whole Foods, you’re equals. If you run into each other on campus, she’s the superior.
Short of becoming President, there is almost nothing you can do that will earn you a default status with everybody. It’s up in the air.
This isn’t social mobility. The whole idea of social mobility, at least in the sense of classes as separate, self-contained social worlds, is breaking down. Instead you have context-dependent status churn. Double-take moments don’t necessarily indicate that one party is a tourist outside their class. There are merely moments that highlight that class is a shaky construct today.
Worlds are mixing, so double-takes become more frequent. But what makes the increased frequency socially disruptive is that status relationships are different in the different contexts.
-
This sort of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. We don’t catch up as much anymore because we never disconnect. Unexpected encounters are rare because online visibility never drops to zero. Truly serendipitous encounters turn into opportunistically planned ones via online early-warning signals.
One effect of this is that relationships can go up or down in strength over a lifetime, since they are continuously unstable and active. Once you’ve friended somebody on Facebook, and their activities keep showing up in your stream, you are more likely to look them up deliberately for a meeting or collaboration. Social situation awareness is not allowed to fade. The active and unstable double-take layer is constantly suggesting opportunities and ideas for deeper interaction.
It’s not that time doesn’t matter anymore, but that time does more complicated things to relationships. In the pre-Internet world, relationships behaved monotonically in the long term. You either lost touch, and the relationship weakened over time, or you stayed in touch and the relationship got stronger over time. Some relationships plateaued at a certain distance.
"Again, we don’t know for sure, but we suspect that the analogy with biological disease is badly flawed. For example, whereas it is probably true that most people are susceptible to HIV, our susceptibility to any particular idea, product, musical artists, etc. varies tremendously, depending on our tastes, backgrounds, and circumstances. Unlike for influenza, to which you’re either exposed or not exposed, even the ideas you do encounter have to compete for attention with everything else that you’re exposed to. And unlike models of disease, which assume that disease spreads exclusively from person to person, information can be disseminated by the media and advertising as well as by word of mouth.
All of these differences, along with many others, could dramatically alter the prospects for social epidemics, as well as introduce other mechanisms entirely by which social change can come about, yet models of social influence reflect very little of this added complexity"
"The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies."
Economies are networks of businesses, just as businesses are networks of people, and people are networks of cells. Networks are everywhere, and the Media Lab’s fall sponsor event celebrated their ubiquity by exploring how these structured interactions affect our economy, businesses, health, and even the way we understand ourselves.
-
Both of these stories captures something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came before, and that we create by taking existing pieces of inspiration, knowledge, skill and insight that we gather over the course of our lives and recombining them into incredible new creations.
"We consider a network of coupled agents playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game, in which players are allowed to pick a strategy in the interval [0,1], with 0 corresponding to defection, 1 to cooperation, and intermediate values representing mixed strategies in which each player may act as a cooperator or a defector over a large number of interactions with a certain probability. Our model is payoff-driven, i.e., we assume that the level of accumulated payoff at each node is a relevant parameter in the selection of strategies. Also, we consider that each player chooses his/her strategy in a context of limited information. We present a deterministic nonlinear model for the evolution of strategies. We show that the final strategies depend on the network structure and on the choice of the parameters of the game. We find that polarized strategies (pure cooperator/defector states) typically emerge when (i) the network connections are sparse, (ii) the network degree distribution is heterogeneous, (iii) the network is assortative, and surprisingly, (iv) the benefit of cooperation is high. "
"We study a networked version of the minority game in which agents can choose to follow the choices made by a neighbouring agent in a social network. We show that for a wide variety of networks a leadership structure always emerges, with most agents following the choice made by a few agents. We find a suitable parameterisation which highlights the universal aspects of the behaviour and which also indicates where results depend on the type of social network. "
The cure for singulatarianism lies is in the direction of sociology and network thinking in general. Monotheism wants to collapse the universe's locus of control into a single transcendent point; whereas the reality of human life has it distributed all over the place. The real radical changes will come not from hyper-empowered individuals but from the networks that are in the process of being woven, of which the current most visible (Facebook etc) are just a shadow, a hint. The world runs on networks and will be determined by them. Perhaps a different theology is required.
-
There is a flip side to this logic of exposure. Jason Potts, Stuart Cunningham, John Hartley and Paul Ormerod co-authored a journal article published in 2008 on the concept of ‘social network markets’ as a general concept that should replace the ‘industrial’ era concept of the creative industries.
-
the creative industries are “properly defined in terms of a class of economic choice theory in which the predominant fact is that, because of inherent novelty and uncertainty, decisions to both produce and consume are largely determined by the choice of others in a social network”. People choose to consume based on the choice of others. The weakest version of this was identified by Adorno who wrote (as I have recently noted) that in “Amercian conventional speech, having a good time means being present at the enjoyment of others, which in its turn has as its only content being present”.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
"Science 3.0 combines the hypothesis based inquiry of laboratory science with the methods of social science research to understand and improve the use of new human networks made possible by today’s digital connectivity. This website is a community where those interested in the advancement of research can share ideas, tools and build connections."
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in networks
-
Educational Tools
These tools can be used to a...
Items: 130 | Visits: 129
Created by: Tracie Hightower
-
Social Networking for Language Learning
Social Networks for Learning...
Items: 18 | Visits: 402
Created by: Victoria Castrillejo
-
Digital Citizenship for Educators
Some resources for educators...
Items: 15 | Visits: 180
Created by: Shelley K.
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo