Tuesday, July 24, 2007

My abstract for the Communications and Information Technology section of the American Sociology Association 2007 mini-conference in Second Life

Exposed edges and tighter nodes: a suggested social networking hypothesis for web 2.0 as seen through a user of facebook a web 2.0 social networking site.



Author Peter Timusk, B.Math, B.A., graduate student of Systems Science at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario Canada.


The author explores previous studies of social networking by pioneers such as Barry Wellman. Using these studies and more recent basic networking models a hypothesis is developed for further empirical study of the networking properties of social networking web sites such as facebook. It seems to the author, who is a new user of facebook in summer 2007 that there is more privacy exposure between persons and at the same time these same persons are brought closer together by networking on facebook. Thus edges between nodes on this social network are exposed revealing these edges to other nodes while nodes themselves potentially learn more about each other as nodes only not just as edges. It is hoped that this hypothesis and other various hypotheses will help either social network analysts, or those who will be data mining web sites, such as, facebook to understand implications of the network’s social structure. Legal and ethical considerations resulting from these hypotheses will also be considered in this paper.

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