Social network -

In this entry I am going to talk a little bit about the relationship between social networking and social networks as Web 2.0 communications platforms and social networks as networks of humans irrespective of platform.

Social networks as I think of them are the networks of relationships in which we all live. In my experience, people I talk to that think about networks think about them from an "ego centric" perspective. I am not using this term as a pejorative, it is a standard term in networks that means "from my point of view." In the picture on the right, that dot way off in upper half on the extreme left edge would have trouble getting information about the folks in the lower right areas because there are so many others he or she would have to go through to get it.

While that person is an extreme case, only talking to a single other, no matter where a person is in the network he or she best sees the immediate area around and there are distant parts of the network he or she cannot contact directly. This is what I mean by an "ego centric view," the view from our particular place in the network. Of course we, magical beings that we are, are looking down on the whole network and can see all of the relationships. We have a "network centric" view, we can see the whole network. This view gives great and special powers to know more about others that are obvious because we have not been able to look at ourselves this way before. Powerful new tools and ways of thinking about the world have allowed us to better understand and describe how our social relation create us and makes us who we are.