Graphically analyzing my Facebook network was revealing both for me and for the Northeastern University network. My network is divided into eight communities, and each is fairly separate. Some of the communities that are from college have more overlap than others. When I was investigating each community and its members to characterize it, I discovered that one of the communities was not a network of people that I had met as a group as the majority of the rest of the network was. This was the Jewish community at Northeastern. This community in my network pulled individuals from across the rest of my college network into a category that I would not have guessed would be so apparent in the graph. They were also the most interconnected and dense community in my network. I think that this is indicative of the Northeastern community as a whole. The Jewish community here is larger than some, and is very well connected through many programs like Birthright, Hillel, and others. People who I did not know knew each other ended up in the Jewish community on my network when I had expected them to be with my Ski Team friends or some other club. I hadn't thought that graphing my personal network would reveal such a strong and dense community on campus.
As we have seen through the readings, dense networks can have beneficial and detrimental attributes. The benefits that my strong connection to this group of people could bring in terms of diverse information are vast. Because each of these individuals come from a broad spectrum university-wide, they each bring unique information to this pool from which we can all draw. However, when we discuss negative things that can be transmitted through a network like diseases, I am probably more at risk to get sick or to be adversely affected by the negative transmission.
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