Points of Social Network Analysis

I have to say recent three class about social network analysis made me known more about social network on the model analysis part. I'd like to talk about my understanding on some basic measures and considerable application of social network analysis.

Social network

A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as  friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory consisting of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-based structures are often very complex. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has 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. In its simplest form, a social network is a map of specified ties, such as friendship, between the nodes being studied.

The nodes to which an individual is thus connected are the social contacts of that individual. The network can also be used to measure social capital – the value that an individual gets from the social network. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.

Metrics in social network analysis

Betweenness

The extent to which a node lies between other nodes in the network. This measure takes into account the connectivity of the node's neighbors, giving a higher value for nodes which bridge clusters. The measure reflects the number of people who a person is connecting indirectly through their direct links.

Centrality

This measure gives a rough indication of the social power of a node based on how well they "connect" the network. "Betweenness", "Closeness", and "Degree" are all measures of centrality.

Centralization

The difference between the number of links for each node divided by maximum possible sum of differences. A centralized network will have many of its links dispersed around one or a few nodes, while a decentralized network is one in which there is little variation between the number of links each node possesses.

Closeness

The degree an individual is near all other individuals in a network (directly or indirectly). It reflects the ability to access information through the "grapevine" of network members. Thus, closeness is the inverse of the sum of the shortest distances between each individual and every other person in the network. 

Prestige

In a directed graph prestige is the term used to describe a node's centrality. "Degree Prestige", "Proximity Prestige", and "Status Prestige" are all measures of Prestige.

Application of social network analysis (in organization management)

There are different levels to apply social network analysis (SNA) to organization management. The problems in organizations can be detected through internal SNA ( structure analysis) . By building the network dynamic models, the trend of organization evolving can be forecast. Through external inter-group network analysis, we can mine the role and position of the organization and discover the room for its development, so to assist the strategic management. In comparing the situation before and after the introduction of IT or other management methods, we can apply procedure control and quantificational measure for various management methods.

Communication and Social Behaviors on the Internet

In the recent two classes, we talk about the communication and social behaviors between different groups in several aspects.

For example, in the class of week five, there are four parts as follow, the group part, the social experience part, the cloud computing part and web 2.0 part. In the group part, we discuss the group structure, the communication networks, decision making problem and theories about  leadership. And I'm pretty interested in the decision making problem and different leadership theories. In my college time, since I am a business school guy, we have been through really long time of group discussion in different projects. Every body talked about his own idea and pretty sure his was the best. We wasted our time on trying to convince each other, so our work could be ineffective. Collaboration is not the nature of human. But We must learn how to work with each other. Recently，after my learning and reading, there is a inspiring video which I'd like to share with you.

It's about a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise, The Marshmallow Challenge. The idea's pretty simple: teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. The marshmallow has to be on top. So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and "ta-da!" they admire their work. But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "ta-da" turns into an "uh-oh," because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. There are a number of people who have a lot more "uh-oh" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school.And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan and then they execute on it. What happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time.

Generally, this video tell us two points. First, the essence of the iterative process is a type of collaboration based on a  prototype. The second point is skills of facilitation. These two points are not only useful in the design work but also helpful in a industrial design or a network design.

In the class of week six, the core concept is the difference between individual cognition and collaborative cognition. Though

class activities collaboration tool-Google docs, here I want to compare my answers with the group answers.

Problem One: What is the definition of Social Cloud?

My answer: By highlighting in red color in the article, I found the definition is that a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. It leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users and its resources exchanged need not be symmetric and can represent vastly different capabilities.

Group answer in the Google docs: Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. It can change the situation that some individual users of a social network are bounded by finite capacity and limited capabilities. A cloud-based usage model is used to enable virtualized resource sharing through service-based interfaces. And the Social Cloud leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users and its resources exchanged need not be symmetric and can represent vastly different capabilities.

Problem Two: What are the possible applications of a Social Cloud?

My answer: By highlighting in red color, I found that there are five aspects of possible applications of a Social Cloud which are as follows: social computation cloud, social storage cloud, social collaborative cloud, social cloud for public science, enterprise social cloud. Each has its own property and difference between others.

Group answer in the Google docs: There are mainly five aspects of possible applications of a Social Cloud which are as follows: social computation cloud, social storage cloud, social collaborative cloud, social cloud for public science, enterprise social cloud. Each has its own property and difference between others.

Examples:

Social Computation Cloud : Onlive.com

Social Storage Cloud: SkyDrive by Microsoft, Google drive(docs can be shared with others), dropbox

Social Collaborative Cloud: Google Docs

Social Cloud for Public Science: Wikipedia, SETI, Rosetta, Docking

Enterprise Social Cloud: icloud

Problem in the PowerPoint:

1.What was the epistemic aims in (1) Class Activity One (individual work) and (2) Class Activity Two (group work)? Is there any change in epistemic aim? If so, why did you change your aims?

The epistemic aim in Class Activity One seems to be just the metacognition part. I find the answer from the paper and highlight it, this process is as same as knowing the knowing and learning the learning. I found the sentences related mostly with explanation. In Class Activity Two, we shared our answers and combined more useful information about the social cloud. We rewrote our group answer by standing at a new point. Listening and learning from other group members, we started to try to think and give a more specific answer. I think that I can give a better answer after I known more advice. That's also why we change our aims from just give a basic definition before.

2.Is there any differences in terms of individual and group epistemic cognition, how?

Of course, there is a huge difference. The epistemic cognition is totally changed and the group epistemic cognition achieves the third level of the cognition. As an individual, I absorb the information from the paper and give my fundamental judgment back based on how deeply I may get, While group discussion helps me go deeper. Besides, group work urges us to give more, so our motivation is much more stronger than before. After all, peoples are greedy, we always want more than we already have.

3.How did you approach to the problem individually and in group, respectively? Is there any differences in the processes involved?

Actually, if time is enough, I would have the same way when approaching to the problem at the beginning, which is learning and thinking individually, and then exchange my understanding with others. Because I think, by this way, my group can have more advice, imagination and information than discussing each other the first time. But I won't say there is no difference in the processes involved. After the accumulation, I am willing to see people inspiring each other or some chemical reactions in the brain, which may make a breakthrough in the project.

Talking about psychology and cognition in online social networks

As we known in the recent two lectures, social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. All the contents showed in the lecture concluding many definitions and illustrations, and there is no doubt that the whole study about social psychology is quite complicated. So why we spent so much time on this aspect? I can't figure out the answer at the beginning till I thought a lot after the lectures and searched related information online. Finally I was pretty sure that if someone really wanted to go into social networking, he must further study social psychology.

About Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we know it is a famous theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation". Maslow use the terms Physiological, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, and Self-Actualization needs to describe the pattern that human motivations generally move through.

In the picture, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top. Social networking involves the Love/belonging level, Esteem level and Self-actualization level. Almost every social website helps people for their psychological need on those three levels. Those social websites live and develop stronger because they make their user more convenient. For example, through Facebook, now we may see new friends and find old friends at home with clicking only. Just a week ago, I was aware of the original derivation about Youtube in another class. The creators of Youtube firstly provided the website for single men and women to see each other as the potential mate via short videos. Nowadays not only the single but all people take videos and upload to the internet to show themselves and get satisfied by high click rates. Such steps of the development exactly follow the level's step. And it's not a coincidence.

Social psychology is so important and mysterious. Metacognition is defined as cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing. Epistemic cognition has 5 key components as followed: epistemic aims , structure of knowledge, certainty, sources, and justification of knowledge, epistemic virtue and responsibility, reliably and processes. If you want to further study about social psychological cognition more than these basic definitions, there is a series of courses by professor Kihlstrom in UC Berkeley highly recommended.

http://v.163.com/special/sp/socialcognition.html

How can technology enhance user experience and cognitive processing in a social network environment? With so many definitions, it seems hard to find a certain answer. But deep inside, every one wants to be a star and has his own needs. To enhance user experience, the website must satisfy the needs and facilitate metacognition and epistemic cognition. The Facebook timeline is a good example. Inspired from that example for a person how about the group timeline for more friends or couples, how about auto-party recommendation between similar hobby groups or the groups of some same core members like auto-friend recommendation?

Afterall, in the future, there will be more and more topics like Cooperation vs. Collaboration. Groups will often cooperate and collaborate in their social networks, including those on the online social networks. What we need to pay attention to is the collaboration is easier but the competition is more intense.