A Node Idea Formed by Chess Club Drama

Many people seem to have the opinion that with the kind of people who go to chess club, everyone can be relatively civil and good sports.

In fact, I have experienced more drama through chess club than I have for any other activity. And trust me, even the track team, math club and drama club COMBINED can’t beat out chess club for the most tension within a closed network.

In any type of play scenario, norms should be effective in regulating a group. However, chess, as a game, leads to independent thinking far more readily than other activities. Therefore, the sort of people who play chess are inherently the type of people who don’t like to listen to others’ opinions and norms for their behavior.

Exhibit A: High school chess club. One student in particular, I’ll call him Ryan in this post, had a particular problem with insulting other students while playing them. His comments ranged from inane to extremely hurtful to the people he was playing. During club meetings, the club president and I told him to act a little nicer to the people he was playing, but he tended to ignore our advice. However, after his behavior continued even during a tournament against another school.

In response, the club president and I gathered a group of friends to confront him about his behavior. Instead of succumbing to the pressure of upperclassmen, he denied any problems with his behavior, and stated that our club president was the one who needed to change his attitude. Even with a group of around 4 students pressuring him, he refused to give in and admit fault. Had the other students and myself not intervened, the club president and Ryan would have come to blows.

Exhibit B: College Chess Club. One student in particular, I’ll call him Jake in this post, had a particular knack of insulting students who played poorly or were inexperienced at chess. The difference in this case was that rather than being an underclassman, my friends and I were the underclassmen and he was an upperclassman.  As he was a very experienced player and my friends and I (all freshmen from the same class) were not particularly good at chess, we simply took his insults as they came.

One day, one of my friends (I’ll say Sam) snapped, and came to blows with Jake. Again, my other friends and myself separated the two. After this point, we talked with Jake about his behavior. Again, Jake denied any problem with his own behavior, simply stating that Sam was lucky he wasn’t going to sue him for assault. (I think it was this comment that made me realize how ridiculous this situation was.) I was the only student who told him to apologize to Sam for his behavior, but he stated that Sam would have to apologize first. Then, my friends and I simply asked him to change his behavior during club meetings, to which he responded that he couldn’t change who he was. Other people should just deal with it. Even with the support of my friends, we could not get him to admit his fault.

In conclusion, I believe that Chess, as a game, has a tendency to produce people who are “Resister Nodes”, that is, nodes that have a particular ability to reject norms that are passed through a network. Compare Chess to, say, a Soccer Team. With a soccer team, because the entire team has to work together, they need to enforce certain norms within the team to keep the team playing efficiently. In chess, however, because every player plays the game differently from one another, no norms can be transmitted through the act of play, as play is a one-on-one affair. Norms must be forced external of the interacting environment, and this causes them to be much weaker norms than those that would be formed by working towards a common goal, whether winning a soccer match, creating a magazine, or acting in a play.

There are other ways in chess club to enforce norms. In particular, if someone insults you while you play them, generally you try not to play with them again. In that case, eventually the person will run out of people to play. In this way, Resister Nodes not only reject norms, but also other links with the people around them. Chess is a fun game to play, but it has a tendency to attract certain types of people that don’t like to listen to other people’s opinions. Unless everyone is willing to get on the same page to encourage good sportsmanship, Resister Nodes can be easily formed, and have a negative impact on the club as a whole. As the current chess club vice president, this is something I need to keep an astute eye out for. If there’s any reason why chess clubs usually aren’t well attended, this is it.

Have you ever been someplace where “Resister Nodes” are easily formed? It can’t be only chess club that has this sort of drama.

The next batch of readings...

Here is the next group of readings, including some referred to in the posts below....

Structural holes, embeddedness and triad closure

R. Burt. 1995.  Structural Holes:  The Social Structure of Competition. Belknap Press. 8-49.

M. Granovetter. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360-80.

P. DiMaggio and H. Louch. 1998. “Socially Embedded Consumer Transactions:  For What Kinds of Purchases Do People Most Often Use Networks?” American Sociological Review 63:  619-637.

Chapter 3:  Strong and Weak Ties

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch03.pdf

Networks as capital

Coleman, J.S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, 94:S95-S120.

Burt, R.S. (2004). Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2):349-399.

Christakis and Fowler:  chapter 3.

Networks as graphs

Easley and Kleinberg, Chapter 2:  Graphs

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch02.pdf

S. Borgatti. 1994.  “A Quorum of Graph Theoretic Concepts.”  Connections 17(1):  47-49.

The Function of Norms in a Productive Network (and Why You Should Never Carry a Specimen Basket)

This is an anecdote that I nearly brought up in class on Monday but opted not to as at the time I couldn’t think of a way to aptly relate my experience with the topic of our discussion. However, after giving it more thought I found a few valid connections so I figured I would post them here.

I volunteer at Brigham and Women’s hospital and last week I chose to volunteer during a morning shift. The major duty of volunteers in my department is to transport samples, blood, wheelchairs, and occasionally patients from one part of the hospital to another. Towards the end of my shift I received a request to deliver some specimens from a patient floor to the lab for analysis. Per usual, I took the elevator up to the designated floor and made my way over to the nurses’ station, expecting to pick up two or three bags of specimens. To my surprise the specimen basket was nearly overflowing, and as I rifled through to find the bags that matched the name of the patient I was assigned a secretary behind the counter suggested that I just bring all of the samples in the basket down since they were going to the same place anyways. I quickly decided that juggling about a dozen small bags whilst trying to maneuver through a potentially crowded elevator was not the best of ideas and, after first ensuring that another basket was present should more specimens be collected while I was away, picked up the basket of specimens and headed for the service elevators.

The service elevators are notoriously slow, so I was prepared to wait a while and leaned against the wall. In a minute or so a hospital worker in light blue scrubs rounded the corner and joined me in waiting. I smiled politely when we made eye contact. She did not. Rather, she at first appeared startled at something about my appearance and then continued to glance at me bemusedly for a couple of seconds. Just as I was about to brush it off she said, “You know you’re not supposed to bring the basket down, right?” I replied that I did not and that a nurse at the station had simply told me to bring the whole thing, so I did. I also made clear my intent to return it as soon as I had dropped off the specimens. She looked at me doubtfully at first, then shrugged it off and genially added: “Just so you know for next time.” I shrugged it off as well, until another hospital worker wandered over to the elevators and the scene repeated. I experienced at least three more of these encounters during my trip from the elevators to lab control. After a while the previous advice-givers mentioned to would-be advice-givers who entered the elevator that I had already been informed of my indiscretion. I was feeling pretty uncomfortable by this point and tried to reduce the awkwardness by assuring them that I wouldn’t stuff the basket under my volunteer jacket and attempt to sneak it out of the hospital. Needless to say I was immensely relieved to complete my trip and return the basket to its apparently permanent home at the nurses’ station.

Perhaps this derives from a tendency to dwell on the past but since the ordeal happened I’ve given it a good deal of thought. Firstly, although I may be wrong, I highly doubt that a section of BWH Employee Handbook is devoted to the hospital policy against briefly removing a specimen basket from its designated location. However, the response that my mistake garnered seems to indicate that leaving the basket is a generally well-known practice, one might say a “norm,” within the hospital. Especially when I recall the variety of personnel who advised me of my error, which ranged from nurses to janitors to technicians wheeling around carts with heart monitors, it is clear that members on various nodes in the hospital network are not only aware of this norm but so attuned to it that there is no hesitation to instruct unknowing members of the network of its existence.  

Monday’s class triggered the return of these thoughts and also added unexplored dimensions to them. For example, the impact of rejecting a social norm (whether intentionally or accidentally) on the behavior of members of the network responsible for the norm is oddly specific to who commits the rejection. In the case of the basket, I had made sure that another one was on the desk and had every intention to return it to its rightful place within ten minutes of removing it. Despite this explanation (which as the encounters continued was uttered with increasingly desperate sincerity), each person who pointed out my indiscretion, though they did so with the best of intentions, still appeared noticeably perturbed or at least caught off guard. It would appear that a far more uncomfortable situation is produced if a member of the network that upholds a social norm breaks that social norm than if an outsider does so, which would make sense as their awareness of the norm makes their disregard of it inexcusable. My experience quite aptly reflects this as my fellow hospital workers, who recognized as one of them by my navy volunteer jacket, appeared to feel uncomfortable by my failure to abide by the norm. Also, even though I knew that I was simply unaware of this norm and only acted in the way that seemed the most sensible, I definitely felt an almost visceral sense of guilt and awkwardness.

Another consideration brought about by Monday’s class is the purpose of such seemingly trivial norms. When one considers the many independently moving parts that exist within a synergic network (such as a hospital), it becomes easier to look beyond the face value of these norms and acknowledge the role that they actually assume. Although this may be a bit of a dramatic supposition, one could speculate that the removal of the basket could cause a specimen to be misplaced which could result in a delayed diagnosis which could prevent the administration of treatment which could have adverse effects on a patient. In this sort of scenario it becomes evident that, with the variety of individual yet necessarily interconnected activities that contribute to patient care, one flaw in the sequence of these activities could produce innumerable consequences with varying degrees of severity. As in many large closed networks that are striving toward a common yet complex goal, the productivity of a hospital relies upon the unhindered functioning of the independently moving yet interconnected gears that drive it. Social norms help to ensure that these gears turn in tandem by establishing fundamental but necessary practices that every actor in the network learns to maintain simply through their membership in the network.

Thus, the reasoning behind even the simplest of social norms can reveal just how integral they are to the success of the networks that institute them. By carrying the specimen basket I unknowingly upset the social norm and as a result could have jammed a few gears in the hidden machinery of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital network. I think next time I’ll just make multiple trips.

Unbooking

I have known for a long time that I am behind on new technology. But after coming into class, I only realized exactly how far behind I am.

I am the only person in this class without a Facebook.  I don’t have a Twitter. Sheesh, I don’t even have a Myspace. I lack all of these newly formed nouns of the 21^stcentury. I have email, does that count?

                                                                     

Therefore, when this class discusses concepts relating to our social networks, I will act as the control group. It’s a pertinent question: in a world where facebook has become the social framework of our human society, is it possible for someone to thrive, or even survive, without it?

For starters, it seems on the surface that my weak ties are much weaker than a facebook users’. Therefore, what are facebookers’ weak ties are my super-weak ties, the likelihood they remember my name diminishes daily. In addition, the opportunities to expand my network are diminished, as I lack the ability to be informed about facebook events. With these kinds of disadvantages, is unbooking preventing me from developing my personal brand? Are there ANY benefits to unbooking?

In the 1980s, if you asked me if it was possible to survive without computers, how would I have responded? Or, perhaps, at the advent of the internet in the 90s? Where would I be now without these things?

Life without Facebook: it sounds like the title of a documentary, but it’s my life. I have a social network, just like everyone else. At least, I hope. But it looks…different. It’s up to me to see what I can make out of it.

Thoughts on "The Social Structure of Competition"

From today’s readings, I would say that the one I found the most interesting was The Social Structure of Competition.  In it, it was stated that people tend to develop relationships with others who are like them. Of course this is true, and it is because these people are likely to be at the same places, thus increasing their probability of meeting. They also have shared interests, which can then be used to initially start a conversation and then a connection.

We can all recall a time when this happened. An example from my own life would be from when I went to China to study abroad this past summer. If I and the others who went with me did not have an interest in learning Mandarin and traveling to China to learn about the Chinese culture, we would probably not have met, considering we are all different years and ages. And although we have all now returned to the states, we do still keep in touch. In fact, 2 couples from this trip formed. One broke up, but the other just recently formed. Had they not gone on this trip, they would never have even been aware of the others’ existence.

Also from this reading, came the statement “size is a mixed blessing”, which refers to the size of networks, of course. We touched upon this topic in class today as well. Clearly, it is beneficial to have a large network, but if it is made up of all redundant nodes, then you are not exactly maximizing your benefits. The same goes for if you have a large network that lacks diversity. Therefore, what really matters is the number of nonredundant nodes. This is why many institutions, such as colleges and universities, always aim to diversify their participants. 

Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Lillian Phuong and I am a sophomore pharmacy student at NU. I am a Massachusetts local, which makes it easy to commute home to see my new puppy. I am an American born Chinese and can kind of speak Cantonese. I also studied Mandarin for a year at NU and went abroad to China this past Summer 2 on a Dialogue of Civilizations. In my free time I like to play board games, watch movies, find new music and just hang out. I love playing tennis both for fun and competitively.Also, Jackie Chan is one of my heroes :)

Initial readings

Also, I will post the readings of the class as we go along.  Here is the first week or so of readings:

The network

Christakis and Fowler:  Chapter 1 (available at):

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/LITTLems/CHRISTAKIS_AND_FOWLER_0316036145._V234762121_.pdf

Easley and Kleinberg, Chapter 1:  Overview

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch01.pdf

Gladwell, M. (1996). The tipping point. The New Yorker

http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/tipping.pdf

Listen to:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks.html

 Structural holes, embeddedness and triad closure

R. Burt. 1995.  Structural Holes:  The Social Structure of Competition. Belknap Press. 8-49.

M. Granovetter. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360-80.

P. DiMaggio and H. Louch. 1998. “Socially Embedded Consumer Transactions:  For What Kinds of Purchases Do People Most Often Use Networks?” American Sociological Review 63:  619-637.

Chapter 3:  Strong and Weak Ties

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch03.pdf

Launching the networked society 2012

I am pleased to launch the blog for "The networked society", an honors class offered at Northeastern University.  This class is devoted to understanding the role that networks-- the set of relationships among people, institutions, objects of various types-- play in our world.  In this Facebook age, our class will focus, in part, on the impact of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) in shaping those networks.  One motif of this course is that modern ICTs blur the traditional social boundaries that we construct for ourselves.  A class is one of those boundaries-- where a class is made up of a small number of people engaged in a discussion in a physically bounded space, the classroom.  That boundary has always been somewhat permeable-- a good class, one hopes, inspires discussions outside of the classroom.  The objective of this blog is to seize, in some small way, the opportunities that social media might play in placing the discussion of the course in the broader discourse regarding our networked world.  Students will be placing short commentaries inspired by the course readings in this space.  If you have stumbled across this blog, welcome!  and please feel free to contribute to the conversation.