Preventing World Collisions

In the Christakis and Fowler chapter entitled “It’s In Our Nature,” they mention the Worlds Collide Theory. This states that if your significant other is introduced to your group of friends, that both worlds experience an upheaval. I can attest to a somewhat innate desire to separate the two worlds in my life.

I have been with my boyfriend for two years now. I am also a member of the Northeastern Alpine Ski Team, for which a very tightly knit (yet calamitous) group of people travel long distances every weekend for two months each Spring semester and spend over 48 hours at a time together. This dedication of two sevenths of your time for about a sixth of your year brings together seemingly incompatible personalities as the closest of friends. Further, a week-long training camp each December means living, eating, skiing, and doing what college students do together at all times of the day. Needless to say, the vast variety of personalities tend to collide by the end of each season (and throughout the year).

My time with my boyfriend has transcended three alpine skiing seasons, and he has yet to meet the vast majority of my teammates. This, to me, is as it should be. A volatile mix of personalities usually breeds disaster for relationships, as I have seen countless times with my teammates (and myself). Couples who are both members of the team and couples where only one member is on the team have come tearing apart, and in order to protect my relationship from this disastrous scene, I have prevented the collision of my two worlds. Despite my nature where I always seek to introduce my friends to each other, the worlds collide theory may provide insight into why my personal Facebook network is so segmented after all.

Blogging: Long Tails and The Dip

Several of our recent readings have discussed the rich-get-richer phenomenon, and applied the concept to blogs.  Shirky writes about the resulting inequality in the blogging world, where a few A-list blogs receive the vast majority of the traffic.  If you try to graph the top sites by the number of in bound links pointing to them, the result is a power law distribution with a long tail, or a logarithmic curve.  While this data isn't mind boggling, I have my own small blog about the outdoors, so it was interesting to me.

In class we talked about long tail graphs are how they are more a line of best fit, with the data at both extremes containing many outliers.  This got me wondering if the middle of the graph is also misrepresented, because of The Dip, a concept coined by Seth Godin.  For example, let's say you start a blog, and start gaining traction.  Then your blog's views start skyrocketing and you think you're going to make it big, but suddenly, you plateau--no more new readers.  In fact, your readership declines slightly.  That's the Dip, and many bloggers will quit at that point, because they don't realize that on the other side is lasting success.  This idea doesn't apply just to blogs, but many other things as well.

For me, this was another reminder that networks are more complex than the graphs used to represent them, and the road to success, especially if measured by in bound links, is not always an increasing logarithmic line.

Small town garage band makes it big...

While I never really thought about it before, after completing the readings for today’s class, I realized how many trends are driven by the rich-get-richer effect. The readings discussed how this phenomenon can be seen in the population growths of cities and the spread of blogs, but one example I couldn’t help but focus on was the way music moves through our society.

There are thousands, upon thousands of garage bands coming out with new music every day, and with the technology available to us today, it is pretty easy to produce a half decent album. While most of these bands will never reach acclaim outside of their hometown, a few of them are smart enough to utilize their social networks and get their music to a wider audience. While another band might be much more talented, the one the gives their demo to the girlfriend of the drummer whose dad went to college with a guy who now works at a radio station is much more likely to get their song on the radio.

If they manage to get the demo into the right hands and the DJ at the station likes the song, he is going to play it more, meaning more people are going to hear the song and like it. From there, those people will download the music and tell their friends about this great new band, and they will tell their friends, and before you know it, that mediocre, small town garage band is headlining a show at The Garden. While you may be one of those people to say “Oh, I knew about that band way before anyone else did”, odds are, that band was stuck in the long-tail of a power-law trend for quite a while before they started to accumulate momentum and break into the mainstream music scene. And it is all because of that first DJ that played the song and unintentionally affected the opinions of all of his listeners that this band was able to make it big.  

Title Town

I have been a Boston sports fan my entire life.  Growing up, my television was always tuned to whichever game was being played, depending on the season of course.  Even if I didn’t quite understand the rules of the sport, I sat down with my dad and watched the Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, and Patriots consistently fall short of championship titles.  The 90’s was not exactly the best decade to be a Boston sports fan but the teams still had their loyal fan base regardless.

There was always the hope that somehow one of the teams would have a great season and miraculously win a title.  That dream finally came true in 2002 when the Patriots beat the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI.  All of a sudden people were wearing Patriots attire and talking about how the Patriots were the best team in the entire sport of football.  My grandparents have been season ticket holders for the past thirty years, and after that win it got even more expensive for them to purchase their tickets.  The waiting list for season ticket holders is still unbelievably long today.

That initial victory was followed up by quite a few others for Boston sports teams in the 21^st century.  The Patriots went on to win two more back to back Super Bowls in 2004 and 2005.  The Red Sox “Reversed the Curse” in 2004 with a World Series Title and then again in 2007.  The Celtics also won a championship in 2008 and most recently the Bruins won the Stanley Cup in 2011.  This amazing streak of victories earned Boston the nickname of Title Town as well as thousands of bandwagon followers.

I’ll admit that I am way more interested in the Patriots and Red Sox than I am in the Celtics or Bruins, but these recent championships have displayed the notion of preferential attachment very outwardly.  Once the teams started winning, they gained more followers and the numbers just grew exponentially from there.  People who never had an interest in the sports before, were drawn to watching the games because it was something that everyone else was doing.  It’s easy to become a fan when your team is winning and everyone around you is routing for them, but it takes an initial victory to make that popularity happen.

Uggly Boots

Today in class we discussed preferential attachment. When thinking about it, I realized how much it applied to the things I buy. Once something becomes a trend, everybody wants to have it and that item becomes particularly popular.

In middle school preferential attachment was especially important to girls. If a certain girl who was considered popular had a specific item, every girl had to get it too. This was definitely the case when Ugg boots became a fad. To be honest, Ugg boots aren’t particularly attractive.  It doesn’t make sense that they became such a hot item.

I remember in 7^th grade for Christmas I had to get a pair of Uggs because all of my friends were getting them. Since they were so popular, they were selling out everywhere. As soon as one person had them everyone was trying to get them. They became really hard to find. I never even really liked what they looked like, actually I thought they were rather ugly, but I begged my mom to find me some so that I could be just like everyone else.  I felt like having Uggs was just something I needed to do because that was the norm among girls my age.

Just because everybody had Uggs they became even more popular. They went from being something very little people wanted or even knew about, to being a must in every girls wardrobe. Well at least it seemed that way in middle school. It didn’t matter if you had boots that were actually practical snow boots, or boots that kind of looked like Uggs, if you didn’t have Uggs you felt left out because that’s what everyone else was wearing.

Virtual Connectivity

I recently joined LinkedIn for the benefits of building my online professional connections network as I search for a final coop and a post-graduation job. LinkedIn, I have noticed, makes fantastic use of the social network algorithms that exist online. The site tags each individual with the number of degrees of separation between yourself and that person, greatly increasing the efficiency of searching your network for a path to certain position or person. There is also a feature which tells you how many connections you have and how many other LinkedIn users that ultimately connects you to. In this way, technology can greatly reduce space and distance between people while increasing network information, providing a bird’s-eye view of your own social network.

However, does technology such as this provide us with a false sense of our network capacity? To what extent can it aid you in your job search to be connected on LinkedIn to an employee of the same company whom you have never met? Does that meaningfully expand your network and provide you with actual connections to jobs? While Granovetter argues that weak ties are strong in that they can connect you to job openings (among other benefits) that you would not otherwise know about, is there a threshold after which a weak tie becomes a non-tie?

Online social networks can be representative of real-world connections, but they often lack the depth of a personal connection. I would believe that an online link to my one time boss would be exponentially more beneficial on LinkedIn than a tie to someone whose only connection was being a Northeastern University alumni. The usefulness of virtual connections is diminished by the power of the social investment in building a professional relationship. Just as a single individual has a limit to the amount of very close friends they can have, there is also a limit to how many professional connections an individual can cultivate (though this can be much greater than the friendship number). However, a key difference between professional and personal relationships is that professional relationships can end and still, years later, provide the same benefits that they once did in terms of networking strength for the positive (or negative) value that a person saw in another. These values online disappear, as a connection is less clearly qualified.

The Adventure of the Well-Connected Consulting Detective

During class not too long ago we were asked to consider people who we knew we were hubs in our social networks. I didn't have very much to contribute to the ensuing discussion, simply because I really couldn't think of anyone who I would distinctly consider a hub. At school I have friends that I've met in various places either by chance or by frequent association, and no particular hubs among them come to mind. At home the general policy in my town is that everyone knows everyone else, so even if there were hubs they'd be difficult to distinguish without Gephi. However, after not too much deliberation I have managed to think of a fictional character who would most certainly be considered a hub within what I imagine must be an impressively extensive network.

For a character who is typically portrayed as too machine-like and focused on the pursuit of logic to be inconvenienced with typical social interactions and pleasantries, Sherlock Holmes is surprisingly adept at maintaining connections with multiple facets of London society. Moreover, his ability to do so is one of the many qualities that enable him to have a distinguished career as a consulting detective. Though he never directly admits it, despite his preference for the company of a violin over that of another human being he is fully aware of the importance of social networking as a source of both information and new cases.

In order to ensure that the data necessary to solve a case may be efficiently obtained, Holmes has contacts both on the fringes and at the center of informative networks. Though he primarily refers to Scotland Yard (or rather, they refer to him) for information concerning a case, his contacts among groups like the British government through his brother Mycroft and the less reputable underbelly of London society through the Baker Street Irregulars (a rag tag team of young street urchins who scurry about the city making inquiries per Holmes' requests) enable him to access data that, without these connections, would have required quite a few network hops and hansom rides. Holmes also frequently dons well-crafted disguises and personas to enable infiltration of networks present in social groups and strata different than his own, as it is easier to get information from those most knowledgeable of the suspect or the crime when he blended in as part of their group. As he explains to a much chagrined Watson while scolding him for having completed an investigation "remarkably badly:" "(I would have) gone to the nearest public-house. That is the centre of country gossip. They would have told you every name, from the master to the scullery-maid (The Solitary Cyclist)."

I also recall that in many of the stories, Holmes' clients are actually referred to him by mutual acquaintances (most often his previous clients.) A better example of using social networks connections to get work is actually seen in Holmes' arch nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Holmes describes Moriarty as "motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them (The Final Problem)." If that image were to be visualized in Gephi, it would produce a fairly accurate image of Moriarty's network structure.

Like Holmes, he sits at the center of an extensive network and maintains ties with various groups, many of which lack connections between each other. A bit unlike Holmes, however, is that he tends to form ties with people on the fringes of these groups, which in his case is advantageous as it helps to protect his anonymity. Holmes, on the other hand, typically has more to gain from forming ties with people with greater centrality in their groups (i.e. Inspector Lestrade and Wiggins, head of the Baker Street Irregulars), as this allows him to quickly access information from these groups by instructing his contacts to make inquiries rather than personally questioning all of their members himself. Thus, through these two characters, we see how the advantages of forming ties with multiple groups can vary depending on the characteristics of the nodes with whom the ties are formed. To reword one of Holmes' preferred adages, once you have eliminated  the unnecessary hops, whatever connections you have, no matter how varied their groups are, must be a greater source of social capital.

Off to Alaska

When planning a trip, it is very hard to get the process started.  You have to figure out where you’re going, how you’re getting there, and what you’re going to do once you get there.  As we discussed in class, it’s often helpful to find someone who has traveled to the place that you are interested in visiting.  I went to Alaska last summer with my family and we found a surprising number of people that were willing to help plan and who offered their opinions on particular attractions.

My family has traveled to 48 states, Alaska being the most recent, so my dad had the vacation planning process down to a science.  We fly to whichever part of the country we haven’t explored yet and then rent a car so that we can travel freely around that area.  However, the Alaska trip was a completely different situation. 

It’s not very easy to drive around Alaska considering the size of the state and the fact that some areas are only accessible by float planes or sled dogs.  We would not be able to travel like we normally do, so my dad started looking around for someone that could give him some tips on the area.  He went to a travel agent but even then he wasn’t completely sure what the best option for travel was.

While talking about our planning troubles at a family party, we realized that my aunt and uncle had gone to Alaska two years previously.  They explained that the best way to tour Alaska was by cruise ship because that way you were able to hit the more secluded port cities.  My dad also talked with some of his coworkers who suggested the best places to go ziplining and the best area to get salmon.  I also found out that someone I knew from Northeastern was actually from Alaska and she was able to give a local perspective on interesting places to visit.

The planning of our Alaska trip is a great example of how to take advantage of networks.  We were able to search through our friends and family for people that had any information on Alaska and use their input to better our vacation.  Once we had specific criteria for searching our network (anyone that had ever been or had a say on Alaska) it was easy to target the people that we were looking for.  Obviously, you can’t completely rely on all of the information that you are given but it sets a great foundation for you to begin.

Lessons from the Chimney-Sweep

Of the readings that we were assigned last week, I particularly enjoyed Mark Twain's "Two Little Tales." I suppose the main reason for this was that I found it especially easy to relate to the frustrated protagonist, whose struggles to so much as exchange a few words with the clearly indifferent director-general were all to reminiscent of previous experiences I have had. I'll readily admit that I am impatient and associate delay with incompetence, and because of this often find myself feeling surrounded by director-generals. But there is a particular instance that this story brought to mind, as at my story's beginning I indeed was the frustrated protagonist and by the its had used the very old and very wise man's advice to my advantage.


My freshman year roommate (who is happily still one of my closest friends) is involved in a program on campus that is based on research in the sciences and mathematics. She had moved on campus before me and befriended many members of that program, and as the year went on I too became friends with these people. Through everyday discussions I learned more and more about the program and soon decided that I wanted to get involved.


One feature of this program is a spring semester course for freshmen that consists of lectures led by the professors in charge. I saw this as an opportunity to finally get my foot in the door, until I realized that it was impossible to fit the course into my spring semester schedule. Determined to get involved somehow, I found out the names of the professors in charge from my friends and began sending emails requesting that I might enroll in the class and only attend once a week due to scheduling limitations. Like the man and the director-general, despite my best efforts I did not receive any responses to my emails and the course went on without me.


 I was not about to give up so easily though, and upon finding out that the program also included a month-long research course during the summer I was prepared to write them an application they couldn't refuse. I also decided that it might be a good idea correspond consistently with only one of the professors in charge so as to get to know one person well rather than a couple of people barely. I ended up attending one of the spring semester course classes and my friends there actually introduced me to a professor whom I continued to email until the application was posted. Fortunately, this time I was admitted to the program.


It is very possible that there were other factors at work, but it appears that, as an anonymous student, my pleas to enroll in the program weren't very well heard. However, upon being introduced to that professor through mutual acquaintances, I was able to get my message far enough so as to be accepted into the program by its head. Like Jimmy in the old and wise man's parable, my message's course was a relatively simple one once I had charted its route through my social network and sent it on its way.


All's well that ends well, I guess. Now I'm a mentor for the students in the class I had tried to get into previously and still have a decent relationship with that professor who I had corresponded with from the beginning. I will say, though, as a mentor I've noticed more evidence of this "Two Little Tales" phenomenon, as a student in the class who was in my situation had to use their connection to another mentor to succeed where I had failed. In my mind, as I struggle to remember all of the students' names, his clever networking strategy has earned him the nick-name "Jimmy the Chimney-Sweep." Which is a bit counterproductive, actually, as I'm pretty sure his name isn't Jimmy.

How My Little Pony Taught Me the Value of Networks

The odd thing about watching My Little Pony, for me and for the legions of other college-age male fans of the show, is how strangely applicable it can be to your real life. Two weeks ago, we covered small worlds, and the story of the “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” particularly struck me as familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I watched the Pony episode the following Saturday that I finally could put my finger on it. She was Pinkie Pie.

Pinkie Pie, in My Little Pony, is a character who “knows everypony in Ponyville”. In Episode 18 (the one on the Saturday after we discussed this), she meets a character named Cranky Doodle Donkey who comes to Ponyville. Determined to cheer him up and make friends with him, she pesters him to be her friend for a while. Eventually, C.D. Donkey explains to her that the reason he’s always depressed is that he travelled all over Equestria (through Canterlot, Fillydelphia, Manehattan…) looking for a long-lost love that he met for one night in Canterlot. Upon hearing this, Pinkie finds his long-lost love in ten seconds flat. Thanks to the fact that Pinkie has such an extensive network, all she had to do was “put two and two and two together.”

So, why is this show, with a target market of little girls, showing the effectiveness of central hubs in a network? Actually, this isn’t at all out of place in the show, where the main pony Twilight Sparkle, a devoted empirical scientist, is told by the ruler of Equestria to study the “Magic of Friendship,” to which she responds as most average males would to the entire premise of watching My Little Pony. Disgust, disdain, how on earth is studying FRIENDSHIP going to help me? Eventually, she comes to realize that it’s the members of her network….oops, I mean, her friends (this is a show for little girls, after all) who give her the strength to overcome anything.

Thanks to this course, I’m starting to see the networks EVERYWHERE. Especially MLP. 

In the tradition of fans who write letters in the style of Twilight Sparkle’s “Friendship Reports,” explaining how the lessons learned in the show changed their lives for the better, here is my friendship report on the magic of networking.

                Dear Princess Celestia,

                Today I learned that if somepony extends their hoof in friendship, you should gladly accept it. Even though we can’t see the structure of their network, it’s a good possibility that through them you can acquire resources of social capital you wouldn’t otherwise have. Whether it’s finding friends that we thought we had lost, or finding bridges to new communities, you should always make time for anypony who wants to be your friend.

                Your faithful student,

                Nathan Hahn

Gen X vs. Gen Y

As I was walking to my first class in International Village this morning, I couldn’t help but notice a glaring difference between the college students and adults coming out of Ruggles station. I would say that probably 95% of the college students had headphones in while only about 5% of the adults did. This made me think about the possible difference in networking opportunities between generations X and Y.

Whenever I talk to my dad, who is clearly a Gen X, I feel like he always has a new story about someone he met on his lunch break that happened to know someone in his line of work that is looking for a job, or something to that extent. He always starts up conversations with people in line getting coffee, at the train station, anywhere, in order to meet people and build his network. While my dad may be an extreme case, I feel like it is much more common for people of his generation to start up conversations with strangers and build their networks that way, where as people of Gen Y tend to isolate themselves by listening to music everywhere they go. People of Gen Y, and myself included, are potentially missing out on lots of networking opportunities due to our constant need to be in a world of our own, avoiding conversation with strangers. And who knows, you could be sitting next the president of a company you’ve always wanted to work for, but because you had your headphones in, you miss out on the opportunity to start up a conversation and build an edge between the two of you.  

This made me wonder what it’s going to be like in 30 years when we’re our parents’ age. Am I making myself an isolate in my social and professional networks by not interacting with strangers and not trying to connect with people? Is that form of seemingly random networking connections slowly dying? How is the next generation going to build their networks if technology continues to isolate individuals? 

Two Little Tales and the Missing Link in my Chain

I enjoyed reading these two little tales by Mark Twain and found them to be quite clever. When the man tried to help his inventor friend out by sending a  letter directly to the director general, it took him 3 months to get as far as he did. In the beginning, he gets no response at all, and overtime manages to make little progress.

His friend just laughs at him and then tell him the story about the chimney-sweep. This story exemplifies how a chain of strong ties is more effective than a single long, weak tie. Tommy makes  a plan so that every node in that chain will tell their one best friend who is willing to do anything for them, and eventually the news about the watermelon successfully reaches the emperor.

Then, based on this the man who is trying to help his inventor friend see how foolish he was in trying to contact the director-general directly, especially since he “intimately knows the director-general’s nearest friend”. At first I thought it would be acceptable for him to try to contact the director-general directly  because of his ignorance of a better method, but now that we are told he knows someone close to him, I think him to be absolutely foolish. Here, I think that the strength of those short ties is extremely useful because the inventor’s friend is trying to get something done/initiate a change in something. In these cases, it is even more useful to rely on the strength/width of ties because the connected nodes must be willing to go out of their way to help you.

Throughout my life, I have learned the importance of making connections with people. Currently, I am in the process of looking for a co-op and have had no luck thus far. Granted, it has only been about a week and a half since resumes were sent out, but many of my peers have already gotten interviews and/or offers. And it is now that i am really kicking myself for not knowing enough pharmacy upperclassmen well because many of them are currently working at the hospitals I applied to/hospitals in general. Clearly, I need to increase the width of my ties with them. If I had a strong close tie, the chain would look something like this. me - close friend who works in a hospital - employer of the hospital, all which would lead me to a job since employers do ask their current employees if they know/recommend any of the applicants.

My roommate's impact on my yogurt choice

The readings we just finished about peer effects in social networks definitely resonated with the way in which my life and social networks have changed over time. I am the type of person to develop relationships out of convenience, rather than compatibility, which I now come to realize is a large contributing factor for the volatility in my behavior. I tend to spend more time with the people that I happen to be around, and with this variance in who I spend my time with comes a variance in my behavior and actions. When I was on co-op, I spent a lot of time with my roommates because they were always around when I was home, and their behaviors started to rub off on me, consciously and subconsciously. I made the decision to go to the gym more often because I saw my roommates going frequently, but I also realized I had started unintentionally buying the same kings of food as them. When I realized my habits, even around the smallest things like what brand of yogurt I bought, were changing just because I was living with different people, I was amazed me. I also realized that this was not the first time my behaviors had changed based on who I was spending most of my time with.  

When I was living with a different group of girls last spring who partied all the time and never did homework, I began to adapt their behaviors because I started to believe that because they were going out all the time, it was fine if I did too. When I moved into my new apartment, I saw changes in my study habits just as I had seen with my exercise routine and eating habits. My immediate roommate is a biochemistry major, so she is always studying which encouraged me to study more than I had in the past. My experiences clearly correlate with Sacerdote’s findings on the peer effects in social networks. Sacerdote concluded that a student’s grades are greatly impacted by the grades of that student’s roommate, and through my personal experiences, I can vogue for the validity in his findings. 

What can you do with your connections?

After reading Lois Weisberg’s Six Degrees I started thinking about how I have connections in my life. I found it interesting to think that I am not as far connected, as I would think from someone famous or someone really important. In response to Rebecca’s last post, I found it even more interesting how one of our roommates is so closely connected to Kevin Bacon. To me that seems crazy that someone I know is so closely connected.

Realizing that the whole world is more connected than one would think makes me wonder what can be made out of these connections. So technically, I should be 6 or less degrees away from the president. Does this mean I would be able to come in contact with him some how if I wanted to change something in this country? Maybe not going this extreme but if you think about it, you could potentially find a connection that is not too far off from you and this could be very valuable.

I think that this is definitely most obvious in jobs. If you wanted to get a job with a particular company you just need to ask around in your network and chances are, eventually you will come across someone or someone who knows some one that could set you up with this job. This could be very helpful to people but I feel like people don’t realize the power they could have if they utilize all of their connections. People need to realize that they are not as distant as they think from important and very influential people. The connections exist, but what people need to do is make use of them to be able to benefit.

The Kevin Bacon Connection

Even if you don’t want to admit it, at one point or another you wanted to be in a movie.  Whether you are an extra who sits in the crowd at a football game or the lead role, it would be cool to see your name in the end credits.  While I personally have never had the chance to experience this, one of my roommates was chosen to be an extra in the movie Freedom Park. 

Cast as “Basketball Player #4”, she got her name into the credits of this very low budget movie shot in her hometown.  The International Movie Database (IMDB) has created a page for every person ever to appear in the credits of a film, so my friend naturally has one for herself.  Seeing as though this film only made $275,000, I assumed that it would take more than six degrees to get from my friend to Kevin Bacon.  Using oracleofbacon.org I was surprised to find out that there are only three degrees (Bacon number of 3) separating my friend from Mr. Bacon.

Emily Van Dam

was in

Freedom Park (2004)

with

Bob McCracken

was in

Spellbinder (1988)

with

Stefan Gierasch

was in

Murder in the First (1995)

with

Kevin Bacon

Even though an exercise analyzing the relationships between “actors” may seem like it has no application to our lives, it shows just how wide our influence actually reaches.  It has been found that you affect people up to three degrees away from you and even if you only have a small group of friends, that group is extremely magnified once you look at the people they are tied to and their friends beyond that.  Celebrities seem to be very separated from the rest of the world, but since my roommate is only three steps away from Kevin Bacon, maybe someday she will do something that impacts him.

Small World

Through the Gephi analysis of Facebook I realized a lot about the connections in my social network. I enjoyed seeing all this data but it definitely surprised me how connected my networks were. I had two prominent networks with many ties in between them. One was from high school and one was from college. Usually when people to go college their life is very separate from what it was in high school, but not for me.

My roommates and my closest friends from home are at the center of my network diagram. They are what create the biggest bridge between my networks. This is because many of my friends from home have come to visit me at school. Once they meet my roommates and my friends at school they typically friend each other on Facebook. Whenever I meet one of my friend’s friends from school I friend them on Facebook because I like to know the people my friends are friends with and it is another way to keep up with what my friends are doing. I think that my friends have this idea when they friend my friends from school. Through me, they all expand their friend networks, and help connect my networks.

Another reason I think my networks are so closely related is because geographically they are close. My high school is only about a half hour from here so a lot of people I went to high school with go here now, or know people I go to school with now. Also, I am friends with many people in surrounding towns from where I live, that I met sports and other activities. Many of these friends either go to Northeastern or have friends that go to Northeastern. Sometimes people from Northeastern friend me just because they see that I am from a surrounding town from them.

All of these connections and overlaps in my network make me realize that this is a small world. It is surprising of me how many people I know from various places that know each other. A lot of people I have mutual friends with I have no idea how they know each other. It is funny to see how much my home and school life cross.

Another surprising thing I found out is that someone is this class is from my hometown. Even though we are from the same high school our networks looked nothing alike. This was interesting because I thought geographic location had a lot to do with my connections. I guess not. I think this is because my connections from home are all strongly connected to each other, but maybe not as connected to other connections in my town.  I think the same thing goes for Cassie’s network. It is funny to see that from such a small town we have such little connections and our networks are so different. Age difference could have a lot to do with this or just that we know completely different people from our hometown. I am even just surprised that I realized a new connection just in this class. I feel like as I meet more people through school or in any situation the world keeps getting smaller and my network keeps getting more connected.

Lois Weisberg

I really enjoyed reading about Lois Weisberg. In fact I sort of wish I was a Lois Weisberg. Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg brought up some interesting things. One of which is that we are not necessarily friends with people we resemble, but that we are friends with people who we do things with. I do, however, think that both of these factors affect who we are friends with.

When we are really young, we do not really have access to many people. For the most part, we go to school with the same people for years. The majority of the people I sent years K-5^th grade with also went to the same middle school as I did. However, in elementary school, there was only one class per grade and this changed for me in middle school when there were at least 6 classes per grade. Because of this change, I did not see many of the same people every day that I did in elementary school. People I considered my friends in elementary school became acquaintances in middle school. And when I reached high school, some of them became like strangers.

Last year, when I was a freshman, I met these 2 girls with whom I became very close with and still am today. At this time, we all lived in the freshmen quad, so we did not have to travel far to meet up. This year, I live in IV and they live on Huntington and just this small adjustment to location has discouraged us from hanging out as often as we did last year, especially in during this cold, dark winter days.

Another interesting point I found was when the author said poverty is not deprivation, but isolation. That too is another statement that I both disagree and agree with. If you yourself are poor, but you know people who will surely assist you than you are clearly in a better position than someone who lacks those connections. But poverty still is mainly being deprived of materialistic things like money.

Social Capital: How My 40 Closest Friends Boil Down to 5

Upon reading “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” I got to thinking about the person in my network who connects me to all of the people I know. Doing the same experiment as the author, identifying my 40 closest friends, and tracing them back to a source, here is what I find. All 40 friends were introduced to me by one of five people. The person with the lowest introduction rate was AP with only one. The second was TQ with four, then JP with six. The two highest rated introducers were SD with 16 (almost half), and myself with 13. The reason why I was my own second-largest introducer was because large groups of people are attributed in my network to various clubs and extracurricular activities that I engage in on campus. In fact, the six individuals that are attributed to JP come from a single club which this person convinced me to join freshman year. Each of the people listed as introducers in my top 40 network are individuals who themselves can be attributed to myself as well.

TQ: 4     SD: 16     JP: 6    Me: 13      AP: 1

When the author discusses the social power of knowing a varied group of people, I have seen that in action in my own life. Just last night, a weak tie – a friend from a trip abroad this summer whom I have not spoken to since – Facebook messaged me asking about possible panelists for an event she is hosting. I immediately could think of several, and began a thread with 12 people requesting their participation. The work that can be done by this social capital seems enormous, and it has pushed me to think about the things that I am doing in a different light. In attempting to move forward with any given project, I now must stop and ask myself who I know that can help me achieve those goals, and thinking about who I know and who they are linked to is much more useful when I have this clear vision of the network. I can now target those links that will be most effective at bridging me to my desired end individual.

An unexpected epicenter

While I'm sure most of us found similar trends in our Facebook social networks, I was quite surprised at the distinct organization of my communities. Before mapping out anything on Gephi, I assumed that I would have a rather large network from both college and high school but I had no idea just how segregated they would be. Each network is very integrated within itself but I have one connection that almost exclusively links the two, my friend Andy Grube. We were best friends for all of high school and both very involved in the music program. We were also both thinking about pursuing chemical engineering in college so we took essentially all of the same classes. It is because of these overlaps in activities that our social networks converged. When we both ended up at Northeastern University to study chemical engineering, our communities continued to develop in similar fashions. When I mapped out my friends on Gephi, I saw a single node connecting two large communities and knew it had to be him. Based on our history and friendship, it makes sense that he would be the epicenter of my network, but I never would have expected it to be so obvious.

I also found the organization of my high school community to be quite interesting. While there are many overlapping connections within my other communities, the amount present in my high school network is overwhelming. The fact that there are so many shared connections shows just how closed of a community my high school was. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was very little information transferring in and out of my high school community, which is characteristic of a closed network. My high school was relatively small, so everyone knew everyone else, meaning information tended to get “stuck” in our community. If anything happened over the weekend, you would hear about it from multiple sources within the first hour of class Monday morning. This is very characteristic of a closed community and moving away from this type of social experience was one of the main reasons I decided to attend a large university. 

I See your Contagious Social Capital (And Raise you Sudo make me a Sandwich)

It’s my general policy to be nice to other people. I have maintained this policy for a while. Being nice will solve about 90% of your life’s problems. Naturally, it’s not for everyone, but for me it has served pretty well.

So I think it’s time to synthesize these two ideas. We have learned about how having a network creates “social capital,” resources that you can use and turn into job possibilities, sales clients, etc. In my case, I expect “favors and niceness” as my return on investment. However, I never stopped to think about how my actions towards people would affect my network as a whole.

If I was nice to one person in my advisement group of 12 students, how would the others become affected? Of course, the students who were most respected would clearly have the greatest effect on my network. This was always part of my problem; I often made friends with people who didn’t have many, so clearly I did not invest wisely. If I had, though, the social contagion that would run through the network would have greatly boosted the amount of niceness I received.

My goal in this is to say, if you ever have the choice to make an enemy or a friend, make a friend. Because A: You don’t want that kind of animosity flowing through your network, and B: being friends affects your friend’s friends, too. To illustrate this, BEHOLD.

This is your network:

----- You -----

This is your dyad:

You ----- Friend

This is a good triad:

You ----- Friend

   |                 |

Friend’s Friend

This is a potentially awkward triad:

You ----- Friend

  |               |

Friend’s Enemy

What do you do? Do you take your friend’s enemy as your enemy, or as your friend?

In my opinion, It’s simply in your best interest to be nice to both. Even though your friend may hate this person, it seems unlikely that they will look poorly upon you for being nice, even to their enemy.  My argument is that this occurs in less than 50% of the cases. In addition! Even if you lose your first friend, the second friend you gain will make up for it. 1 – 1 + 1 =  1. So the maths says you can’t actually come out behind in all this. I’m all about the maths.

So, whenever you get the chance, don’t be afraid if your network has a lot of these.

You ----- Friend

   |              |

Friend/ Friend’s Enemy

Just a thought based on my experience. I had SO MANY OF THESE in high school. I had all of them, I think. All the awkward triads.

I think my point is, for these kinds of triads, don’t worry so much about the hatred contagion running between these two people, because love trumps hate, like, every time, man.

Does anyone have any examples of where they tried to make friends with their friend’s enemy and it went horribly wrong? Or sometime they didn’t expect to become friends with a friend’s enemy but it happened anyway?