COM 383 Social Networks

Also, Depending on where a person lives, the network within their neighborhood could have low transitivity which increases suicide or it could have high transitivity which increases safety but can have an extremity of cult development.  

Recently, a family member of mine and their friends in their social circle have been trying to live a heather lifestyle.  They have started to attend matcha rallies to embrace substituting this green tea powder for coffee as a means of energy, and to be more mindful of what is put into the body.  The circle effect has been created in their network because my family member knew someone that boasted about the benefits of matcha so they were more likely to try it out as opposed to seeing an advertisement on tv or hearing one on the radio from someone they were unfamiliar with. I have also started to use this powder more frequently than I have in the past. The barrier effect is not present in this network because there are no barriers that are preventing me from getting to know someone because I am invited to all of the rallies. 

     There are not that many classes that teach skills that can be applied to one’s everyday life. I mean, as interesting as Physicist III’s “strong force” is, or Differential Equation’s integrating factors are, I haven’t been able to apply them in my everyday life.  However, much to my surprise, I found myself analyzing my social network with my newly found tool kit that I receive courtesy of COM 383.  I start pondering whether I should decrease my strong ties and increase my weak ties or vice versa.  I wonder if a lack of homophily was the reason I didn’t join some networks and struggled to join others.  I learnt the social similarities between Chicago’s trouble youth and the victims and perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.  I realize that even though I complained about my Face Book friends, I maintained our connection because I valued my social collateral.  I evaluated which social networks where needed for success and which ones won’t allow for it.  This course and more like it are precisely what IIT needs.  We have some of the world’s smartest students and this course teaches them how to apply their genius to social settings.  This is perhaps, the most important lesson they can learn.

The hierarchy network also relates to the hub authority structure because the hub (the president) points to the authorities. Authorities are people that look toward hub for advice, the are also content providers. 

The other thing that makes me chuckle is that a "no body" or lesser known person can post a picture on Instagram rocking the same outfit as an "Instagram celebrity" (someone who has no real fame) but because the Instagram celebrity has more social capital they will receive more recognition. 

Before I deactivated my Facebook I saw myself becoming an outlier in the network because I would rarely ever update my status or post pictures. So, after the video was posted and shared many times, I deactivated my Facebook again.  I found that my network became too dense and I was uncomfortable with it.  I did not care to know anyone's business other than the people that are in my social circle and there was little to no diffusion in the network. I ended up creating another one, just for work and I am pretty content with my decision.  I have left that network behind (my old Facebook) and I have started a new one.

Perhaps one of the more interesting article sets to me was the recent one concerning dark networks. It made me wonder how many networks are in existence today that no one knows about, and how they are able to operate "underground" while advancements in technology and surveillance work to uncover them. How do these dark networks operate, and do they all hold sinister objectives, or are there some dark networks that work to set things straight? After reading and discussing the article on terrorist networks, it now makes sense why seeing the network as a whole would help make a more strategic decision to disrupt or destroy its effectiveness. When little is known about the leadership or whereabouts of key players in a terrorist network, it must be extremely hard to uncover it. This helps explain why visible connections of the network are so crucial to observe, and will slowly lead to more and more network visibility. For my project I am actually looking into a historical "dark" network of sorts, pertaining to gang connections in Chicago during the prohibition era. These networks were able to operate for a lengthy period of time without being busted because of the use of underground tactics, false fronts, and powerful leadership and loyalty ties which kept these gangs together but also stirred up rivalries which ultimately led to their demise. 

     Using egocentric network data acquired by survey of the Tare sector of the Butare prefecture, the author attempts to determine the sociological factors that may have been at play during this event. In particular, the author tests the effect of the size of an individual's network, the network characteristics, and how countervailing ties influence participation in the mass-scale violent behavior. McDoom finds that both the size and network characteristics are important determinants of participation. A large social network can infer that an individual is socially active, meaning that they are more likely to know people who are participants. The network characteristics (i.e. the people who you are connected to) play a large role in the case of socially influential people to an individual, such as family, neighbors, or like-minded people. Following the concept of homophily, individuals will have a higher likelihood of connecting with people that share similar characteristics. In this case, a person with a large social network will have higher density with people who are participants, which will influence the behavior of the individual. What I find interesting about the findings of this study is that nonparticipant behavior does not negatively influence an individual's participation (if participation is seen as positive, not good, but positive). It would appear that this finding goes against my intuition that another person's behavior is influential to an individual's behavior. This is probably because of social dynamics, where people have a tendency to participate in group behavior, especially if the particular behavior reaches critical mass.

Overall, many of the concepts that we learned in this class has led me to to become more conscious of my own social networks and how they can intertwine and affect the opportunities afforded to me on my journey through life. :)

The one thing I absolutely love about this class is that more emphasis is paid on us understanding the concept rather than getting into tedious work which might not be of much use. Most of my other classes treat course work as an absolute, getting a desired end result is a 100% necessary. In this class, more stress is laid on the process, the process of how and why things happen and if we are able to showcase that, it means that we have learnt what we were supposed to. 

The denser a network is the more careful we have to be to not step on our own toes. I hadn’t given much thought to how fast information could be spread within a network. Then when we had looked into Professor Hemphill’s Facebook network, I had realized that people are connected to one another in many different ways and you never know who may know the same people that you know. It is an almost scary thought to think about all of the different ways that people can be connected to one another. Looking at the network made me realize how easily information can spread and how dangerous dense networks can be, and how important it is to watch yourself and things you post on social media. Dense networks can provide support and many other benefits but just as easily become a dangerous web if we aren’t careful. 

This course in Social Networks was much more interesting than I originally expected. I expected most of the class to be researching Facebook and Twitter or other smaller social networks. I enjoyed the first half of class where we learned of all the vocabulary and different types of networks. Going over those helped significantly when we started to get into the articles since the authors used the vocabulary, we learned, to talk about the different networks and describe their studies. The thing that I learned that I think stuck with me for this class is realizing that networking is all around us. It is not just Facebook and Twitter and all of the other social networking sites. We ourselves are networks, we may not see the connections physically but we are all somehow connected in one giant network. Whether you are in a clique, cluster, or you are a loner who happens to only have one friend we are all connected. It is almost scary in a way because this makes everyone much easier to reach out to and find things out about. I've always noticed this especially here in the IIT social network since we are a small school and it is easy to connect with almost everyone with a  small number of steps. It is easy enough to prove especially on Facebook. It is just like the Wikipedia game where you can pick anything and within 6 links you can always get to Hitler.

Upon finding this class way back last November or so, I was only interested because I had assumed that we would be looking at the fronts of social networks.  The actual use of it.  It sounded interesting because everyone nearly uses them and I myself heavily do.  Little did I know the vast knowledge I would learn about what social networks can tell us and how networks are so important in society.  I cannot help but to analyze my surroundings day to day and just think about how they attribute to a much larger network.  It was a great feeling to be able to tell some people close to me how networks such as Facebook and Twitter or just every day social situations broke down into more "technical" terms.  For some odd reason, my favorite part of the semester was when we first learned triads.  It was very interesting to me.  And then the game when we had to get as many points as possible over a few rounds through negotiation.  I felt like that really brought out certain qualities in some people whether it be ignorance or intelligence or even pure generosity.  It was fun all in all and I will never forget the things that I have learned this semester.  

That last part, that social and power transmission networks aren’t fundamentally different, was the most surprising revelation from course to me, and perhaps the most valuable thing I learned. The implication was clear: while individuals may be unpredictable (although I’m sure psychologists will disagree with me), the behavior of groups-and individuals within groups-is not. In other words, while someone may act randomly alone, put them in the context of their acquaintances and we can get a good prediction of how they’ll behave.

Overall, I want to dedicate this post to say how glad I am that I took Communications as a minor. My major is Information Technology and Management and so as a requirement we have to minor in something. I decided to take Communications because I figured it would be the easiest to take. I was wrong, for the most part at least. I have learned more in this minor, which consisted of 5 COM classes, have improved my writing skills, and comprehension more than I have in the past 4 years in IIT taking anything else. However, such knowledge was not easily learned, I had to really go back to re-edit a lot of my papers, go back and reread whole readings, actually study for finals. I see now the work that goes into applying communications in real live settings. Whether it be online, in an organization, our workplace, or in school knowing how to communicate effectively in essential. In the case of COM 383, this course was not an exception. The "Understanding Social Networks" book by Kadushin was a very helpful tool in learning the various measures and properties of networks. Now I understand that social networks are not just present online but that we all make part of networks ourselves in our physical world. Knowing that here are different types of networks and that each can have its advantages like disadvantages makes you examine your own network. I used to think that my connections with past friends or people I only see a few times were not important now I know that they are my weak ties and that these connections may deem useful in information transfer or even when looking for a job. The readings demonstrated how extensive networks can be and their role in other social issues. I was specifically impressed and shocked how these social network researches are able to take a community and identify its networks and properties with extensive research of course, but once they put it all together in their papers they make it seem so easy. Me on the other hand did struggle to finish my final project, which I would have  I liked to finished but the data was not working in my favor. Yet I knew where I wanted to get at and I would have understood what I would find in the end because of all the readings and examples we were looking at in class. I do not think this was a complicated subject at all to understand but implicates a lot more than just the members/nodes in the networks and the knowledge these networks can impart us go beyond than just knowing our position in space. All in all, I really enjoyed this class and got a lot of out it that I know will be useful to apply in my life to come.  Even if you cannot take this as a major or minor I would highly recommend taking COM classes while at IIT.

 This post is late in semester, but I figured I used this last post to state what I learned last Thursday about dark networks. First of all, I knew that you have to be careful in choosing your friends and acquaintances but after seeing how our position in our network in them can screw us over it makes you want to rethink your spot. Of course we might not all be involved in a conspiracy but our networks can still work against us. In some cases we will belong in centralized or decentralized networks and who and how we transmit data to our fellow nodes really matters. For examples, I think that my siblings and I form a centralized network where the oldest one is the one in the middle. I am a node connected to my older sibling but I see how if we ever wanted to get them in trouble all it took was for everyone to point fingers at them and they would get in trouble. Why? because there was no denying it, oh if everyone says so it must be true, or maybe it was just our parents trying to teach them life lessons. In any case, the structure, the topography, and properties of a network really come into play when go back in examine why somethings happen and even more beneficial when we can use them to predict future circumstances and possible prevent negative events.