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A social network is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. The term was first coined in 1954 by J. A. Barnes (in: Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish, "Human Relations"). The maximum size of social networks tends to be around 150 people (Dunbar's number) and the average size around 124 (Hill and Dunbar, 2002). The International Network for Social Network Analysis is the professional association of social network analysis. Started in 1977, it now has more than 800 members and is headed by William Richards (Simon Fraser University). Its website is: www.insna.org Social network analysis (related to network theory) has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology, anthropology, geography, social psychology, information science and organizational studies, as well as a popular topic of speculation and study. Research in a number of academic fields have shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. Social networking also refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools. These applications, known as online social networks are becoming increasingly popular*. Introduction to social networks
Applications in social science Social network theory in the social sciences began with the urbanization studies of the "Manchester School" (centered around Max Gluckman), done mainly in Zambia during the 1960s. It was followed up with the field of sociometry, an attempt to quantify social relationships. Scholars such as Mark Granovetter expanded the use of social networks, and they are now used to help explain many different real-life phenomena in the social sciences. Power within organizations, for example, has been found to come more from the degree to which an individual within a network is at the center of many relationships than actual job title. Social networks also play a key role in hiring, in business success for firms, and in job performance. Social network theory is an extremely active field within academia. The International Network for Social Network Analysis is an academic association of social network analysts. Many social network tools for scholarly work are available online (like "UCINet" or the "network" package in "R") and are relatively easy to use to present graphical images of networks. Diffusion of innovations theory explores social networks and their role in influencing the spread of new ideas and practices. Change agents and opinion leaders often play major roles in spurring the adoption of innovations, although factors inherent to the innovations also play a role. Socio-technical systems is loosely linked to social network analysis, and looks at relations among individuals, institutions, objects and technologies. Popular applications The so-called rule of 150, states that the size of a genuine social network is limited to about 150 members (sometimes called Dunbar's number). The rule arises from cross-cultural studies in sociology and especially anthropology of the maximum size of a village (in modern parlance most reasonably understood as an ecovillage). It is theorized in evolutionary psychology that the number may be some kind of limit of average human ability to recognize members and track emotional facts about all members of a group. However, it may be due to economics and the need to track "free riders", as it may be easier in larger groups to take advantage of the benefits of living in a community without contributing to those benefits. Degrees of Separation and the Global Social Network The small world phenomenon is the hypothesis that the chain of social acquaintances required to connect one arbitrary person to another arbitrary person anywhere in the world is generally short. The concept gave rise to the famous phrase six degrees of separation after a 1967 small world experiment by psychologist Stanley Milgram which found that two random US citizens were connected by at most, six acquaintances at any given time. Current internet experiments continue to explore this phenomenon, including the Ohio State Electronic Small World Project and Columbia's Small World Project. As of 2005, these experiments confirm that about five to seven degrees of separation are sufficient for connecting any two people through the internet. Internet social networks See also: List of social networking websites, Motivations for contributing to online communities The first social networking website was Classmates.com, which began in 1995. Other sites followed, including SixDegrees.com, which began in 1997, Epinions which introduced the circle of trust in 1999, followed by European equivalents Ciao.com, Dooyoo and ToLuna. It was not until 2001 that websites using the Circle of Friends online social networks started appearing. This form of social networking, widely used in virtual communities, became particularly popular in 2002 and flourished with the advent of a website called Friendster. There are over 200 social networking sites. The popularity of these sites rapidly grew, and by 2005 MySpace was getting more page views than Google. * Google has a social network called orkut, launched in 2004. Social networking began to be seen as a component of internet strategy at around the same time: in March 2005 Yahoo launched Yahoo! 360°, their entry into the field, and in July 2006 News Corporation bought MySpace. *. In these communities, an initial set of founders sends out messages inviting members of their own personal networks to join the site. New members repeat the process, growing the total number of members and links in the network. Sites then offer features such as automatic address book updates, viewable profiles, the ability to form new links through "introduction services," and other forms of online social connections. Social networks can also be organized around business connections, as in the case of LinkedIn. Blended networking is an approach to social networking that combines both offline elements (face-to-face events) and online elements. MySpace, for example, builds on independent music and party scenes, and Facebook mirrors a college community. The newest social networks on the Internet are becoming more focused on niches such as art, tennis, football (soccer), golf, cars, dog owners, and even cosmetic surgery. See also Social computing. Most of the social networks on the internet are public, allowing anyone to join. Organizations, such as large companies, also have access to private social networking applications, known as Enterprise Relationship Management. They install these applications on their own servers and enable employees to share their networks of contacts and relationships to outside people and companies. A recent development of social network is the integration of marketplace element in it, known as the Social Marketplace Quantities in Social Network Analysis Betweenness Centrality Closeness Centrality Degree Centrality Eigenvector Centralization Clustering Coefficient Cohesion Constraint Contagion Density Integration Path Length Radiality Reach Structural Equivalence Structural Hole See also | |||||||||
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