Social Network Analysis

Social network is social networking services which were created by six degrees of separation theory. Broadly speaking, all interactive products whose main purpose is building relationships can be classified as SNS such as Facebook, RenRen, Happy network, etc. In 1967, psychology Professor Stanley Milgram from Harvard University founded six degrees of separation theory. More specifically, the interval between you and any a stranger would not be more than six, that is to say, you can know any a stranger through the most six men. According to the six degrees of separation theory, the social circle of any person keeps amplification, and finally become a large network. This is an early understanding of social network. According to this theory, social network was established for social internet services through the acquaintances.

Recent research shows that social networks not only have properties of small world and scale-free but also have some common characters. Firstly, high clustering coefficient, in other word, the friend of your friend is probably also your friend. Secondly, strong community, it means that the social networks consist of several groups. And members of the group relate closer, on the contrary, the relationship among groups drift apart.

People analyse the social relationships of social networks by the network theory and graph. Just as Professor Rosanna introduced in the class, each participant in the community is called an actor and depicted as a node. And valued relations between actors are depicted as links, or ties, either directed or undirected, between the corresponding nodes. So the social network can be represented in the form of different kinds of complex graph structures. There are many relationships between nodes of the links.

Below list some spread modes of social network:

Center type

Center type spread is the most typical transmission mode, fully shows the SNS information dissemination characteristics: one-to-many. For example, when blogger post a new microblog, the followers receive the updated information and repost the microblog. Therefore, the spread of the microblog mainly concentrate in the circle which is at the centre of a blogger. This mode of transimission is commonly seen in the microblog of celebrities, professional organizations and some experts.

                                

                                    center type 

Key point

Key point spread can be divided into the single point transmission and multiple point transmission. Single point transmission means that a local center propagation point is formed outside the blogger. The transmission amount of the microblog is more than the blogger itself. And multiple point transmission means that multiple points play an  important role in the development of the microblog transmission. In this mode, the transmission amount of the microblog is few at the beginning, but the reposted amount would go up to the peak in the subsequent time. This mode of transmission usually occurs in some microblogs of enterprises or organizations.

                       

                               single point transmission

                                 

                              multiple point transmission

                    

Chain type

Chain type spread is a kind of minority transmission mode. As shown in the figure, to take blogger as a starting point, the information constantly spread towards a certain direction. Although the diffusivity is not strong, it could maintain a long path. This mode of transmission is commonly used in some private discussion and some technical related microblogs. Relatively speaking, this way has less of an impact, also, the reliability rate of this propagation way is not high.

chain type

                            

Groups in Social Networks

What’s group? It is an important concept proposed by Professor Rosanna last class.According to my understanding,it is a circle that is consists of some people who have same interests, same preferences, same topics or same target.But after the class on Tuesday, I have more deep cognition that, psychology group is just any number of people who interact with each other even though they do not share the same ideas. Sometimes the group may last a short period of time and after that the group members become unrelated with each other. That sounds a bit ridiculous.But it is true.

             

                    groups of Facebook

In terms of groups in the Internet, there are many kinds of existing forms. Some are based on the friendship or for the purpose of making friends so the members in these groups might be also good friends in real life. For example, the friend groups in Facebook or Twitter.

Although Facebook has occupied the unshakable position in the field of social network, more and more users started to complain about the information without pertinence. In a social network, you accept the information from all the friends, and at the same time all your friends could also receive the information you distributed. Even though some benefits could be brought from the large amount of information and users, it is restricted to mine and share the deep interests of the users. Meanwhile, some personalized social network which is based on the interest has begun to attract people's attention. For example, the DOUBAN group, it can gather the people who have the same interest to a clique, so called XIAOZHAN. In this relatively private circle, the users could have a in-depth discussion about the subject of interest, and make friends with similar preferences so that they could obtain the new knowledge and obtain the help of experts. These groups may be established for the purpose of sharing the same interest and preferences. Their hobby can involve different field such as music, movie, sport and travel.

Douban xiaozu

The similar representative example might be the social networking websites, named circle launched by Google. The CIRCLE put forward such idea: school, work, friends and family and they are holy and pure in different environment. So we can communicate with different people different things. But Twitter and Facebook has destroyed"context" in social network. This may limit the development of online social networks. The rapid development of Google+ and various new social networks points to a clear direction - more special-interest social networks. Social networks have changed gradually from the mass spread forms to the personalized acquaintance circle mode. When people are tired of the shallow level information exchanging in the popular social networks; when people began to feel frustrated since they could not met friends of the same abilities and interests after a moment, people might give up part of the popular social networks and return to more personalized groups in internet.

Groups of Google+

Recently, the emergence of a new trend in social network services is to search for nearby people - those users may wish to meet people. This kind of discovery mechanism implements the function through some service based on geographical location.For example, the sign-in application of Foursquare, automatically found people nearby with the same interests in Sonar and Momo, and the group chat services in Wechat. Today, the smart phones are bringing about a new network: social found services rather than social network services.

Foursquare

References:

[1]http://xiaodm.blogchina.com/1263957.html 

[2]Wikipedia;

[3]http://cn.technode.com/archives/3633/   

[4]Social Network Analysis: A Handbook; John Scott

Three Levels of Cognition in Social Networks

Pofessor Rosanna has given the concepts about three levels of cognition in social network last class and explaint it. Three levels of concepts are Cognition, Metacognition and Epistemic Cognition respectively.

According to various concepts about cognition introduced in the lecture,how can technology facilitate user experience and cognitive processing in a social network? The answer may be a matter of opinion. Because Different people, different views.
Cognition:
When we come across new things,it would process in cognitive stage.For example,if you see some interesting pictures on your Facebook or Twitter.It is just a Sensory memory that you would retain Immediate stimulus and it usually lasts about one or two seconds in the environment . But as we know, first impressions mean everything when it comes to attracting the users.Try to imagine when the users enter a website, the first thing comes into their eyes might be the Home Page. So if the social network owners or the managers of the web platform can design the Home page more Particularly Charming, the number of the users may increase. Also, in order to aid your users in learning your application, the welcome webpage should be added and beautified.
Some attractive website pages show below:

[5]

Metacognition:
Metacognition is something that can help you review the content easily or make convinence for other users. [1]It refers to a level of thinking that involves active control over the process of thinking that is used in learning situations. Planning the way to approach a learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating the progress towards the completion of a task: these are skills that are metacognitive in their nature.[1]What's more, metacognition could make people retain information in short-term memory and then turn onto long-term memory even semantic memory in the end. For example,some website allow users to add some features or labels on to a social webpage to facilitate other peoples experience at a metacognitive level.                    

   Recommendation on Douban

                    

                           

                                                Rating and Comments at App Store

Epistemic Cognition:
Epistemic Cognition, just as Professor Rosanna presented on the class, is something that individuals reflect on the limits of knowing, the certainty of knowing, and criteria of knowing. [4]It is the skills for understanding the limits of knowing and the nature of problems that can be addressed by the thinker[4]. Mencius(孟子) once declared, to make the letter book is better than no book.(尽信书不如无书) In short,when people learn more knowledge, they could manage knowledge systematically then doubt and justify what they have learnt through thinking .It is a process of correction and producing new knowledge. We should not fully believe what others and all books have said. Those who follow the source and authority of knowledge are lack of independent thinking ability.

Recently, Anti-Japanese protests erupted in a lot of cities in China afer a group of Japanese rightists landed on the Diaoyu Island. With no doubt, it is worthy of praise to express patriotism. But we appeal to a small minority of extremists could express patriotism rationally and peacefully without irrational or violent behavior. These destructive behaviors are something lack of epistemic virtue and responsibility and would cause the loss of property belonging to Chinese compatriots. Fortunately, many people are rational and condemn these violent manners through posting some photo of the rioters on social network ,such as Facebook and Weibo.

                              
So it is important to make good use of three levels of cognition in social networks.

References:
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
[2]Lay epistemictheory in social-cognitivepsychology,AW Kruglanski - Psychological Inquiry, 1990 - Taylor & Francis
[3]www.douban.com
[4]http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/recordDetail?accno=ED257858

[5]http://sensisoft.com/

Social networks on personal privacy issues--Human flesh search

The course of social networking holded last night remind me of some ideas about Social networks on personal privacy issues.

As we know, the personal privacy is a concept that different from security issues .When it comes to the security issues , it generally means how a hacker gains unauthorized access to the computers of other peoples or organizations. However, Privacy [1]is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively.

More specifically,privacy could falls into different categories: personal privacy, informational privacy, organizational privacy and spiritual & intellectual. And the informational privacy can be divided into several categories. One of them is Internet privacy which mostly occurs on social networks. It is the ability to [2]determine what information one reveals or withholds about oneself over the Internet, who has access to such information, and for what purposes one's information may or may not be used.
Can you image that a single person can cause a large damage through incorrectly relaying an erroneous information(以讹传讹)? That is the unimaginable power of social networks, what’s worse, it would easily ruin a person.


Recently , I have saw a film called ''Search'' which is directed by Kaige Chan. It is a complex story starts in a normal morning when an urban white-collar lady refuse to give her seat to an old man on the bus.And her manner is recorded into video and posted on the internet by a girl. But it completely change the destiny of many people in the end.

The film shows the power of internet which is not only share the basic purpose of online communication and interaction , but also may convey the wrong signal to mislead large number of peoples.

Meanwhile,It bring up an important concept.Human flesh search,so call ''ren rou sou suo'' in Chniese(人肉搜索).It is [3]a literal translation from the Chinese, are internet searches by people for people. In online forums or bulletin boards, netizens search for and share information to identify an individual, their whereabouts, personal and contact details.

[4]

                     



Just as Professor Rosanna says, it is something that people can slove but computer cannot do. It also match the concept of ''Distributed Human Computation'' I have learnt in class on Tuesday .

There are always two sides to everything.To some extend,it can be made good use of helping people ,just like finding lost children and appealling for donations. However, it may make you believe something that is not true by telling you a lie or wrong impression.

With the discussion above,we can soon come to the conclution. On one hand, social network provide a platform for people all over the world to share their own ideas even without exposure of their identity. On the other hand, even though internet that does not openly expose their users’ identities may provide enough information to identify the profile’s owner. At the same time,some confidential information maybe showed on the social network by the insouciance owners. Without doubt, It can be easily exploited by the person with ulterior motives.

So be careful and protect yourself on social network!


References:


[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy)


[2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy)


[3]http://freespeechdebate.com/en/discuss/chinas-human-flesh-search-engines/

[4]YOUTUBE