For me, presently the most impressive network in the world is not the network of email traffic, Facebook friends or cell phone calls. Both for sheer size and complexity, the personal network must surely take the cake. In many ways, it is not merely a superset of most communication networks. It is something different. It exists in minds. The rest is a proxy. This is the network of mutual acknowledgement, of individuals as particular beings, rather than as signifiers of something larger, such as a town, ethnic group or any classification. Like rebranding bank machines as “Personal Touch” machines, as Royal Bank did in Canada, rebranding this network of particular relationships as the personal network, we make it sweet and homely. It softly bumps up against community, and might mutter “sorry” for complicating terminology. It is anything but homely. It is not simply a friend when you’re feeling down or a neighbor to loan a cup of sugar; it is almost everyone who knows anyone.
In my work I show samples, like microscope slides, of this personal network. They are not perfect. But it is worth knowing that the people who try to access this network in a measurable way realize they are not perfect. But nor are they completely made up and hopelessly useless because of recall error. Firstly, it is not “error”, it is bias, and it is not noise, it is difference in how people understand the world.
Such samples, done through direct questioning are a snapshot of the world as is understood, rather than the world as made (via telephone calls, emails or twitter feeds). At a fundamental level, there is no need to be sneaky about this network, or seek to assert the primacy of the ‘communication network’ simply because it allows researchers to scale up their ventures more rapidly. The fact that humans presently cannot read each others minds, or directly access these minds should not be forgotten, or ignored. It is this limitation that prompts us to use representations like a call graph. But it is so obvious, or at least so taken for granted, that we often forget this network of minds is the real target. The fact that we cannot read minds means that we must infer them, not that data stands in for them, not that behavioral traces encapsulate them.
Of course, not every large scale network concerns the personal network. There are many designed systems that benefit from the understandings brought on by massive scale network analysis; we need efficient power grids, transportation hubs, waterways, commodity distribution systems and so forth. But that should not blind us to the fact that as humans, it is the relations to each other that matter most. The rest is just a proxy.
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I'm a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Here you can find my blog of short thoughts, musings and announcements, my academic record and various other professional documents such as network images and links to my software.
Indeed, indeed…but what happens to this network of minds when it is mediated through a kaleidoscope of different communication platforms?
@Nils, this network becomes mediated by these interactions, their affordances and their constraints: Friends get filtered through the logic of “Facebook friends”, contact with close ties becomes contact with whoever is available and so forth. I think these are important facets of life and I obviously believe they are worth study. However, I believe these mediated networks are just that – mediated. Ultimately, I am interested in the latent network of mutual acknowledgement that underlies these networks.
When we study these networks it is easy to mistake the networks that exist as mediated by these networks for the real network. danah addressed this particular issue in a blog post (of which I was a contributor) called “Will the real social network please stand up”. This post is partly meant as an extension of the first part of that essay.
Excellent reflection Bernie! What do you think about the discrepancies between what people say in interviews vs what they actually do? Focusing only on what people do (friending on Facebook, tweeting, etc) does seem narrow but I wonder how best it can be informed by what people answer during direct questioning. Perhaps it’s all about being good at asking questions?
It’s a good reminder; I hope you keep going with the blog, Bernie, I especially enjoyed your last post as it’s something I think about often. Re: this post – I think what Neal was getting at with his thesis provides an intersting perspective on this – if we truly want mediated networks to better reflect the actual social networks that exist between human, our technology needs to evolve so people can express themselves in more nuanced/precise manners. But I guess the problem with that is that if social networking tools become too nuanced, they also run the risk of becoming unusable/not fun to use.
> “that should not blind us to the fact that as humans, it is the relations to each other that matter most.”
A good reminder of the human element, but is it not also the case that some of the parts of our ‘personal networks’ are not people, but institutions? Online that can be seen when someone considers themselves to be part of a group centred around a blog, or a forum, or a fan site, a game, or whatever; offline, people may for example see a church as a crucial part of their personal network, but the priest and people in the church may change…
I guess I’m coming from an ANT perspective, with actants and actors all playing a role in networks.
but are they really institutionally-based, or is it a deeper shared-interest base? institutions or architectures may be the platforms, but i’m not conviced they are essentially constitutive of the community or network.
@Julian
No doubt, some parts of our lives are institutions. However, the network as understood by SNA implies nodes of like type, such as friends on Facebook. I am in no way discounting the significance of institutions, or their capacity to funnel, constraint or focus our thinking and our actions. I am only trying to legitimate the network of personal acknowledgement.
When we think about how a network evolves, we can only get so far by understanding forces endogenous to the shared associations. These networks are mediated by many things, such as social roles, institutions, geography and the like. But for analytical purposes, I think they should be considered distinct things.
@Andres I think this involves a couple things both inductive and deductive.
Inductively, I think we can get very good approxomations through most behavioral and publicly articulated networks. Reality mining a la Sandy Pentland is also a very promising technique. And of course, asking people certainly helps.
Deductively: We need some good first principles on how we understand networks, i.e. the mental software underlying our sense of associations with others. Robin Dunbar and colleagues are making some great strides in understanding the “Social Brain”. This can be seen as the limits of social associations in many cases. How many names can you remember as specific individuals – a few hundred, a few thousand? Certainly not a millioin. There are limits both to how we know and what we store. What are they and how can they inform this?