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April 14, 2005
“The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people.”
Interesting post from Anne Galloway about our constructions of social network concepts. She considers Jyri Engeström’s assertion that
A profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term ‘social network’ by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan in the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as ‘a map of the relationships between individuals” ... The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.
Posted by kkennedy at April 14, 2005 03:17 PM
Comments
Thanks for this, Krista. We touched on this idea a little during class today, specifically in terms of how policies are created (and documents drafted) that themselves function within social networks (as shared objects, perhaps). I guess we might say that they function as inertial culture in Urban's terms or that they temper the centrality of human nodes in SNA.
Anne's post is chock full of linky goodness, for anyone interested in following up on this...
Posted by: collin at April 14, 2005 10:36 PM