Posts Tagged: networks

Research / Thoughts — No Comments
29
Nov 05

When the gates to the walled garden are thrown open

There is safety in numbers. I think we all believe that. When we’re in a group, we adopt herd mentality; things we wouldn’t do before become personally acceptable if the crowd so dictates. One person wouldn’t think of storming a football field; when the stadium empties on to the field, the dynamic of what is acceptable in the eyes of group members changes. Not only does the unacceptable become acceptable, but the unacceptable can become the dominant mode. Of course, not all crowd-incited actions involve the changing of one’s personal ethics – a crowd can gather to lift a car off an accident victim, where one person might not. When we are challenged by the ethics of crowd actions, it is generally the curious, outlier actions they take that stick in our mind.

This brings me to a rash of news stories I’ve seen in the past few weeks, where university administrators have entered the “walled garden” of the Facebook, and delivered sanctions to students who have posted pictures of alcohol consumption. A big hat tip is due to my colleagues in the UNC Social Software Working Group, who came up with the idea of monitoring the news for interesting stories regarding the intersection of campus authorities and students regarding Facebook content. I’ve been doing just this for some time, and you can follow my work at del.icio.us/fstutzman/uncsswg – 158 stories and counting. The pathbreaking event involved student at North Carolina State University, and was quickly followed by an event at Northern Kentucky University. What sparked this post, however, was a event I discovered this morning, where the University of Missouri’s newspaper ran the story of BM* front and center.

M, the vice-president elect of the Missouri Students Association was singled out for a picture she shared on her Facebook profile; that picture was then reposted to print, and to the web. In the picture, the alleged Ms. M is drinking a beer while duct taped in a chair. It’s a funny picture. It’s a really funny picture. And it probably would horrify anyone who is happily in denial about campus life.

That brings us back to my reflections on our actions in crowds. The Facebook is a living, organic crowd in which students actively, and exhaustively, participate. The Facebook is a crowd mediated through the virtual sense, but in no sense of the word is the Facebook ‘virtual’ to students. It is a practical augmentation of their existing networks, and their participation effectively carries the weight of real-world actions in their crowd. Just as one might might act differently in a country club compared to a dive bar, the Facebook allows a comfortable “space” for a semi-public, semi-virtual existence.

I assume Ms. M, the NC State students, and the Northern Kentucy University students were all acting under the same assumptions when they posted their pictures; it is the same assumption hundreds of thousands of other college students share when they post similar pictures. While they knew these pictures were public, they were not identended to be public; as they were crowd participants, their actions were justifiable as crowd behavior. This is not to say that when posting drinking pictures, the students even cognize they are doing something “wrong” – the “me too” nature of participation on SNC’s, particularly the Facebook, almost forces this sort of behavior. At the same time, scandalous picture posting may be a risk students are willing to take to gain recognition and reputation inside the SNC – which in the Facebook almost flows transparently from the virtual to the real.

If you think back five, ten, fifteen (and so on) years, before digital photography was everywhere, before SNC’s, and you remember the (print, egad) pictures students would post in their dorms, what were they? Were they the sanitized, censored pictures of healthy student activities we seem to think ever *exsisted*? No, they were zany party pictures, almost all involving a ton of students hugging in front of the camera, some clutching cups. They were embarrasing shots of the roommate passed out. They were pictures of drinking at the pre-game tailgait. In essence, they were pictures of the things students thought were fun and interesting, but they also spoke to the identity of the student at the same time. Fast-forwarding from the past to now, we can clearly see that nothing has changed. The print pictures are still up on the dorm room walls, but the original digital copies are posted to the Facebook.

The case of Ms. M is so interesting to me because it is one of the first times I’ve seen a student’s private SNC identity so harshly leave the “walled garden” of the Facebook. As if one student had repeated a private conversation to a reporter, we the public are thrust into Ms. M’s life, and her life is undoubtedly changed as a result. I don’t take issue with the fact this happened – rules are rules, regardless – but it does make me wonder about where we go from here. There is something very special about a community like Facebook, but the potential reprecussions of one’s “crowd” existence becoming a public existence are worrisome.

At any rate, there’s no reason to think that this particular phenomenon will stop – but sooner or later, it will fall out of the news, and just become another facet of living lives augmented by SNC’s. Students are extremely resourceful, and they will find ways to deal with this and other challenges. With a hat tip to TC, though, 16 members of UNC’s police have Facebook profiles – and if you need any more proof that the virtual is the real, there it is.

Update – As it turns out, there’s a back story to this particular event.

Update Two – The day this story was released, someone on Missou’s campus stole over 1,500 copies of The Maneater, the campus paper that published Ms. M’s picture. A criminal investigation is ongoing.

Update Three – Names have been removed from this post. See the original story for names.

Thoughts — No Comments
11
Jan 05

Community Feedback and the Collective Mind

Jeff replies to my post with great ideas, that I happen to disagree with a little. He says that by trusting experts, we can essentially mine a collective trusted source for topical information in a blogosphere. To that fact, I absolutely agree with him. If I had the opportunity to watch the blogs of editors of the top ten daily newspapers in the US, I’m sure we could put together a meta-analysis that brought us some of the most trustworthy news anywhere. My straw man suffers from two problems, though: one, such an enterprise would be anathema to traditional news editors, and two, the type of news I would likely find on these editor’s blogs would be held to the same standards and rigor of their newspapers, so I really wouldn’t be discovering novel news.

Stepping back for a second, let’s think about the concept of “novel” news (for lack of a better term). This unique, blogosphere-generated news happens to be one of the things I think are most interesting about blogs, and news blogs in particular. Lets pose a hypothetical scenario, in which a blogger scores an interview with an administration source that wants to disclose potentially damaging material. From the traditional news perspective, would our hypothetical editors link to this post? I’d argue no. But if the event I described did occur, I’d be willing to bet you that it would show up in Blogdex.

How then do we implement a blogdex-like system that values and recognizes users that put forth the most “novel” material? This is the question I am trying to answer. We can look at the entire blogosphere and conduct crawls that give us posted links, and aggregate them, and sort them by citation – I believe that’s pretty much how blogdex works. But that doesn’t ensure trust, because a unlimited crawl can easily be bombed.

How do we begin to understand trusted authorities in blogospheres? I believe this is the key question. Blogs are an interesting phenomena, one reason being that barriers to entry are quite close to zero. This presents interesting liabilities and challenges, of course. For example, we can theoretically trust a newspaper because a newspaper is financially obligated to tell the truth. Blogs, on the other hand, generally offer only social capital, and social capital in a medium as ephemeral as the net is hardly reason to keep the hordes honest. At the same time, though, news comes out of the blogosphere that beats the traditional medium – reason being that bloggers are everywhere and reporters are few and far between. Should we regard each emerging blogo-news story as false until it steamrolls credibility in well-known (read: financially or socially obligated) blogs?

Perhaps. And that just might be the beginning of a model. Simply put, experts are not everywhere, and they posses different criteria than non-experts. My theory doesn’t really hold up in all disciplines (string-theory bloggers aren’t going to usurp the establishment any time soon, I’d bet), but for a discipline like news – we all posses the ability to judge the binary empirical of “good” news. Start aggregating these judges, normalize the distribution, and watch for trends, and you might have a system that provides reliably true, under-the-radar emergent blogo-news stories that can be followed up on.

Envisioning such a system, though, we almost have to define new criteria for trustworthiness. For if we are to only trust a “trained” system, and your first blog post is your most important, how would you ever be discovered? I can only imagine such a system working with news bloggers adapting some of the practice of traditional media, such as calling a source or following up in person. Proxy webs of trust could be established, key signing parties for blogo-newsies could emerge.

I could also be overthinking this. The simple fact of the matter is that such a system, with its checks and balances and diverse participation may never exist, as it could be too difficult to implement (or to draw people in, for that matter). Our current model of trusted-source crosslinking might be as far as we get, and it just might be up to the experts who watch aggregators like blogdex to decide what should be passed up to the traditional media.

I say this, though, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I particularly don’t like the idea that a cartel might control extra-blogosphere access to intra-blogosphere stories. I don’t believe such a model is sustainable, and I don’t think its realistic. But if we are to take the next, We the Media-type step, how do we enable systems that provide checks and balances? And how do we ensure these checks and balances are not censoring the news-producing masses? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I’d sure like to see them.

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8
Jan 05

Group (In)Cognition in Blogospheres

The concept of group cognition in the blogosphere is a topic that is starting to interest me. I believe it is also starting to interest Jeff, and I have him to thank for pointing me in the directions of my initial citations.

Let’s first do a cursory overview of cogntion in networks. Cognition is a function of the network; actor behavior in a network is cognition-dependent. Routed information networks behave quite differently from social networks; while they operate on the same principles, it is the cognition of nodes that affects, even prescribes, network behavior.

The blogosphere is a social information network. While blogs structure our behavior in certain ways, we operate socially, and our behavior is fairly generalizable. As such, it is possible to model certain behaviors for actors. For example, the frequency with which we post, the structure of our links, the topics of our postings – for populations of certain size, all of these can be generalized and predicted. I’m starting to drift a little off point, though.

The commom element of blogosphere activity is the information transaction. Either we deposit or extract information, and frequently we do both. As I said before, though, our behaviors are generalizable – so can we generalize our information transactions? And if we can, how can we discover information trends in blogospheres?

Management and organizational science journals discuss the concept of the collective mind; it is sometimes referred to as social cognition, and a few other derivatives. Weick [1] explains the phenomenon well, introducting the heedful participant. While an interesting read, I don’t feel that it translates effectively to the blogosphere. For example, the collective mind requires actors to be both aware of their responsibilities, and cogniscent of their role in the organization. I’d argue that a good number of bloggers are not aware of their responsibilites as bloggers (are there responsibilities?) and they are certaintly not aware of their roles in the organization (what organization?). (If you need proof, just click on the Next Blog button above)

I’m not ready to throw collective mind theory in the trash, though. Let’s switch perspectives a little, and instead of assuming that the bloggers are the network participants, let’s assume that information consumers are the network participants. All of a sudden, things start to look up. As an information consumer attempting to mine the blogosphere for good information, I fullfil both of Weick’s criteria. Furthermore, if you start to aggregate all of the information consumers out there, you might just start to be able to discover a collective mind. A qualitative question remains though: if a group of information consumers can mine the blogosphere for information, how can we be assured the information is “good.”

In certain contexts, we’re not concerned with “goodness”. For example, consider a viral link that is passing around the net. While the goodness of such a link is person-dependent, our traditional means for information retrieval would likely discover such a link. Next, consider a context where we do value goodness: news. Indeed, goodness is only one of the criteria we’ve accepted to value our news (in this case “goodness” is being used as truthful or reliable, not as in sunny rainbow happy news), but it is the most important criteria (from where I sit, at least).

We are challenged to mine the blogosphere for news that is both “good” and relevant. How then do we apply the principles of the collective mind, or social cognition, to this discovery? I believe the answer lies in creating applications that allow us to value and reward information sources.

Lately, I’ve tended to believe that blogo-news is largely conversation-based. Just as Doc pointed out that markets are conversations, I tend to believe the emerging blogo-news cycle acts similarly. If the blogs are to officially upend the traditional news establishment, we’ll have to discover ways to ensure reliability in blogo-news. The conversations we might have; the way information consumers converse with news producers; all of these elements may serve as means for evaluating the blogosphere.

As we continue to examine the blogosphere, and even begin to rely on the blogosphere (Paul says that bloggers will soon get first amentment rights), we must come up with new ways for evaluating the blogosphere. Certainly, our collective activities tell us things; if we can develop methods for discovering and analyzing our cellective behaviors, we might be able to take some serious next steps in blogosphere analysis.

[1] Weick, Roberts. Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38 (1993): 357-381

Thoughts — No Comments
19
Oct 04

Explainer: Epidemics in Small Worlds

Chances are, if you find me talking about small worlds, I’m usually doing so in the context of a social network. One of the interesting things about the small worlds model is its wide applicability to many organic networked systems; a social network is just one of these. For today’s post, we’re going to analyze transversals in small worlds, in the context of epidemics.

Why epidemics, you ask? If you haven’t noticed, a shortage of flu vaccine is dominating headlines, causing a good deal of anxiety among vulnerable and non-vulnerable populations, and roiling the presidential race. At the outset, I must admit I’ve never really been one to buy into flu vaccine hysteria; in fact, frenzies in recent years have been somewhat amusing to me.

The situation this year is markedly different from those of years past, where shortage was relative and supply was tight, but sufficient. At last count, the total number of vaccinations available to the public was an optimistic 40M, 42M short of the 82M goal, and 30M short of the 70M shots required to vaccinate all at-risk populations.

A small world, as defined by Watts and Strogatz, incorporates two key properties:

The clustering coefficient, defined as an average of connections a node makes to other nodes in the world.

The characteristic path length, defined as number of path transversals one must make to encounter other nodes in the world.

Put a little more plainly, think of your close friends. If you’ve got a lot of close friends, with whom you spend most of your time, your group would have a high clustering coefficient. (Note though that the model is concerned with averages, which allows us to create population-level estimates.) Now, thinking in another direction, imagine your friend’s friend’s friend. The path to this friend is three transversals, i.e. you’d need two contacts to get in touch with this particular person. (Again, please note that path length is also an average in the model.)

Visualize if you will, the network of your friends. Imagine their network of friends, and so on and so forth, until you can’t see out any further. What you see probably looks something like a network, connected by lines, some intersecting, some not. In a small world, we’re concerned with both regular (your friends) connections, and also the connections you might make randomly, say, by striking up a conversation at a coffee shop (these are considered random in a small world network).

You might wonder how flu vaccines fit into all of this. As I’ve said, in a small world, we’re concerned with the people we know (regular), and the people we come into contact randomly (random). We realize we’re more likely to associate for longer periods of time with our regular connections, but these random connections also are valuable. In fact, when evaluating our small world in the context of a transmissible disease, all of our connections have roughly the role: transmission vectors.

How then does a supply shock to flu vaccine supply affect our small worlds model? In this particular network, vaccines affect path length. For example, think about all the people you had 10-minute conversations with today. Lets assume, for my illustration’s sake, that this conversation represents the opportunity for virus transmission. Now, try and imagine all of the people you talked to for ten minutes, then going on and talking to someone else for ten minutes, and so on and so forth. A scary thought at the surface, right?

We’ve established that small worlds are defined by the clustering coefficient and path length of nodes, so lets investigate how vaccines affect the model. I argue, perhaps obviously, that vaccination increases the path length between nodes in our cluster, often so effectively that random connections represent the only transmission vector. This is an ideal circumstance: when those who you most frequently come in contact with are vaccinated, and those who they come in contact with are vaccinated, and so on and so forth, we might just chalk it up to dumb luck that we chose to have a random ten minute conversation with a transmission vector. In fact, its not dumb luck, its just a small world.

The illustration does not end there, though. Imagine a world of clustered nodes (you and your friends or coworkers), where considerably less people are vaccinated. The path length in this world decreases so that, according to the model, there are higher chances that a regular or random connection could introduce the virus to your cluster. And, as your clustering coefficient rises (characteristic to small worlds), your incidence for transmission increases.

Imagine that you and your coworkers work in a small, ten-person office. While it remains true that you and your coworkers spend most of the day interacting with each other and each other only, you do interact in other clusters, and with random persons. Now, if there are less vaccinations, and more transmission vectors, the chance of you bringing back the virus to your work cluster are much higher.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably asking yourself why I just spent all that time illustrating something that is pretty much conventional wisdom. The fact is, our worlds are small, and this reveals why the flu vaccine is so important.

Imagine the case of a highly contagious disease, such as smallpox, emerging in a population. What would epidemiologists do? First, they would quarantine the individual, virtually increasing that individual’s path length to other nodes to infinity (no outside contact). For all intents and purposes, this is what a vaccination scheme does: it artificially raises our path length for transmission between nodes in a network. By making it harder to find vulnerable nodes and clusters of nodes on a network, the vaccine not only keeps us healthy, but it keeps others healthy.

Lets now assume the current situation, where only 60% of the at-risk population will be vaccinated. This, again, is an artificial shock to our small worlds model, but it can tell us quite a bit. Watts and Strogatz modeled log path length (p) with respect to path length (0) for probabilities ~0 to 1 that the world was random. The way this data plays out is that as the world gets more regular (higher chance of transmission), path length is affected strongly. The model points out that the shock is not proportional. A 40% increase does not mean that 40% more people could get the flu; in a small world, a 40% increase would create an exponential increase in flu transmissions.

Therein lies the real cause for alarm in our current shortage. We tend to think of the flu on a personal level – I should get vaccinated so I don’t get sick – and while this works out on a micro level, we often fail to realize that we are getting vaccinated so that we don’t get others sick. How will this eventually play out? The small worlds models predict a grave situation; ultimately, the nature of the particular strain of flu that presents itself will determine how well it can exploit the gaps in our small world model caused by the vaccine supply shock. Nevertheless, it is of great concern, and I’m scared of the flu for the first time ever.

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