The (Anti)Social Net
Elizabeth F. Churchill
Yahoo! Research | churchill@acm.org
[ 1] Gates, G. “Facebook
Privacy: A Bewildering
Tangle of Options.”
The New York Times,
12 May 2010. http://
www.nytimes.com/
interactive/2010/05/12/
business/facebook-
privacy.html/
September + October 2010
interactions
It is time we stopped talking
about social networks and started talking about people, groups,
and relationships.
This is probably the fourth
time this week I have said this:
Social is more than the social
network. It is perhaps the 500th
time I have said it in the past
two years. Maybe the 1,000th
time if you count the past five
years.
This is not news to anyone
who takes a deep research interest in social networks. Rooted
in insights from sociologists
like Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand
Tönnies, and Georg Simmel,
the field as we know it emerged
in the 1930s with the work of
Jacob Moreno, who invented
the “sociogram”—a connection
diagram showing people’s connections to each other. The term
“social network” was coined
in the 1950s by John Barnes, a
British anthropologist, inspired
by the work of Elizabeth Bott
and her kinship studies.
These early social network
researchers were primarily and
fundamentally concerned with
people and the social man-
agement of relationships and
connections. Tacitly or explic-
itly there was concern for how
methods could be triangulated
with other data sources to foster
an understanding of how people
interact—these pioneers were
not satisfied with the elegance
of the model alone. They under-
stood there was something to be
said for looking at people as peo-
ple, not simply as gates or nodes
or conduits to other people. They
fundamentally understood that
a social network is more than a
collection of nodes or dyads; and
that each node has dimensions
that may not be instantly or eas-
ily obvious or observable, but
may be highly relevant for pre-
dicting their behavior in the net-
work. For many early social net-
work researchers, understanding
that models of human social
behavior are simplifications was
an ethical as well as a scientific
stance; they were interested in
understanding people, and less
invested in the belief they could
engineer behavior. One gets the
sense that some current network
analysts believe their models to
be more interesting and more
accurate than the human activi-
ties and people on whom their
abstractions are based.
