Exercise 10.1: Social networks case study
1. I’m going to assume that if someone has left comments on a blog then they are ‘following’ the author. Blogger appears to have an explicit ‘follow’ function but I can’t find a parallel on WordPress so for group members not using Blogger I will just define ‘following’ as whether a comment has been left or not.
By this definition, in the blue pod:
Andrew is being followed by James, Sarah and Tyrone.
James is being followed by Sarah, Andrew and Jessica
Sarah is being followed by Petar, Jessica and Andrew
Tyrone is being followed by Sarah and James.
2. I have assigned the participants the following letters:
- A – Andrew
- B – James
- C – Sarah
- D – Tyrone
3. In the following matrix, each row represent a participant and each column a follower:
| A | B | C | D | |
| A | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| B | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| C | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| D | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
The social network diagram is below (created with Balsamiq – another great web 2.0 tool!):
Social network diagram for the blue group
4. The fact that the diagram I was following (from the OLR notes) didn’t seem to articulate an direction of flow made analysing the relationships far more difficult – but here goes:
The http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm reference in the notes talks about the self-organising behaviour of complex systems and how environmental feedback is a key driver to this. One pattern that I noticed is that it seems rare from someone to be following someone else and not have that replicated. Blogs – unlike Facebook or LinkedIn – have two strands to relationships, A can follow B and B can follow A. The interest that one participant shows in another (feedback from the environment) often seems to result in an additional new relationship being formed. It was interesting to note that “Such responsiveness occurs even when the elements and system are non-organic, unintelligent and unconcious…” – no comment!
Another interesting observation is the loose framework that the subject is run within, yet many of the blogs turn out to be quite similar in length, tone and tool. This seems to be a by-product of running the subject in such an open forum where everyone’s work is open to the group – a group style emerges. Pavard (2006) mentions that socio cognitive systems are sometimes emergent and mentions the resulting crowd behaviour.
5.1/5.2 I don’t believe that I would find the same patterns if I was to perform this analysis on another set of blogs due to the Order/Chaos dynamic of complex systems described by Kirshbaum (2002). He describes the uncertainty of predictability due to the tiniest changes of environment creating a huge number of possible results. There is much environmental uncertainty in a university class – particularly one that incorporates distance learning. Although most students seem to be school teachers from rural areas in Australia, I for example am an interaction designer based in London. It is impossible to predict what effect that could have on the dynamic of a group. Kirshbaum uses the ubiquitous illustration for this principle of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another. In an environment as varied and complex as an online classroom, many of the contextual factors are not even perceivable let alone predictable.
Kirshbaum, D. (2002). Introduction to Complex Systems. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm.
Pavard, B & Dugdale, J (2006). An Introduction to Complexity in Social Science. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from http://www.irit.fr/COSI/training/complexity-tutorial/why-socio-cognitive-systems-are-complex.htm.
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