Representing social networks

The Technology Review published by the MIT (since 1899) on the issue of march/april 2008 is addressing the questions of representation of social networks. As Erica Naone states in her article “ The idea of a social graph – a representation of a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances – gaines currency last year as the popularity of online social networks grew: Facebook, for example, claims to have more than 64 million active users, with more 250,000 signing up each day”. Some of the examples illustrated in this article are: the blogosphere from Matthew Hurst’s visualizations of relations between blogs and referrals in blogs; comment flow realized by Dietmar Offenhuber by the MIT Media Lab representing relations between individuals in MySpace; or the so called Twitter social network which is the result of “shared messages, and brief updates on microblogging” where received and sent information can illustrate what is shared and who is sharing it.

>> Those representations of networks are not placed based but as urban thinkers and urban sociologists we see a lot of potential in analyzing how social interactions take place or not in specific spaces. And if the networks are placed-based see what are the relationships between the physical place and the type of relations someone can have with someone else. With this type of information we could eventually better understand the social and spatial context of cities, and propose new links or networks that bring together social actors and physical places.

>> Check our previous posts on social networks.