Making sense of the
networked audience:
The case of Facebook
Bernie Hogan, PhD
Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
Local Social Summit,
Latitude 51.50015, Longitude -0.12624
November 3, 2009

A preamble: Why Local?

Scale
matters.

Email and IM contact by distance.
Source: Does Distance Still Matter in the Age of the Internet?
Diana Mok, Juan-Antonio Carrasco and Barry Wellman

Rural connect to Rural
Source: Network in the Garden
Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios and Christian Sandvig

Nope.

Wellman’s
Networked Individualism
Door-to-door People
Place-to-place Mail and landlines
Person-to-person Email and profiles

The particular case
of a peculiar age
Person-to-person networking does not undermine
distance. But it makes distance secondary to specific
social relationships. Each individual has their own
unique relationships. Like a thumbprint.
We live in an age of access.
To be local is to be accessible.

The paradox of convenience
Everyone is somewhere, no one is everywhere

network literacy:
a visual primer

CORE CONCEPTS
types
centrality
communities
network layouts

There are many types

Networks
can show
prominence
Generally referred to in
centrality. There are
many types:
Degree - links in & out
Betweenness - shortest paths
Power - high degree friends
Closeness - easily reachable
Source: Carter Butts

Networks cluster
Liberal and Conservative Blogs
Source: Divided they Blog
Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance

Source: Jim Moody

Where does sociology fit?

Because you can never have too
many irrelevant friends

Reasons for friends on SNS
1. Actual friends
2. Acquaintances, family members, colleagues
3. It would be socially inappropriate to say no because you know them
4. Having lots of Friends makes you look popular
5. It’s a way of indicating that you are a fan (of that person, band, etc.)
6. Your list of Friends reveals who you are
7. Their Profile is cool so being Friends makes you look cool
8. Collecting Friends lets you see more people (Friendster)
9. It’s the only way to see a private Profile (MySpace)
10. Being Friends lets you see someone’s bulletins and their Friends-only blog
posts (MySpace)
11. You want them to see your bulletins, private Profile, private blog (MySpace)
12. You can use your Friends list to find someone later
13. It’s easier to say yes than no.
Source: danah boyd
19

Sometimes,
this is what it
feels like to be
on the site.
Source: HolyTaco.com

But again,
scale matters.
Men with 500 friends only have
mutual conversations with 10 of
them. Its up to 16 for women.
That’s less than 4% of friends.
Source: Economist (via Overstated.net)

So why bother?
Person-to-person networks need access
controls.
Social network sites fill this niche...poorly.
Nevertheless, there’s gold in them thar’ hills.

Trace data can tell a lot
Source: Predicting tie strength with social media.
Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios and Christian Sandvig.

And networks
can help simplify
Friends of friends are not randomly
scattered, but clustered in coherent locales.
Community detection can isolate these
groups.

Friend lists
Tedious and incoherent

Greedy Community
Large swaths of Sense

Eigenvector Community
Well partitioned, but
overwhelming

Current tools to leverage
networks on Facebook
• Touchgraph
• Nexus
• Friendwheel
• Mysocnet (Mine)
• http://apps.facebook.com/mynet_phaseone/

So what?
• Lurking within any social network site profile
is a host of clustered peers. Discovering
these groups through community detection is
an effective way to bring coherence to a
profile, and help it scale.
• Consider: planning a party, recommending a
concert, sending out important news.

Nearness is now a
social property as
much as a spatial one.
This is not the same thing as collaborative
filtering. Networks do not signify
similarity, they signify community. These
are the people that do things together,
disclose information to each other.

Looking forward
Particular relationships create networks.
Norms of access create overload.
Thinking local is one solution, but it is partial.
We need to create contexts, so users don’t
have to.

Thank You
Bernie Hogan
Research Fellow, OII
;)
@blurky
bernie.hogan@oii.ox.ac.uk