280,977 research outputs found
Communication in Online Social Networks Fosters Cultural Isolation
Online social networks play an increasingly important role in communication between friends, colleagues, business partners, and family members. This development sparked public and scholarly debate about how these new platforms affect dynamics of cultural diversity. Formal models of cultural dissemination are powerful tools to study dynamics of cultural diversity but they are based on assumptions that represent traditional dyadic, face-To-face communication, rather than communication in online social networks. Unlike in models of face-To-face communication, where actors update their cultural traits after being influenced by one of their network contacts, communication in online social networks is often characterized by a one-To-many structure, in that users emit messages directly to a large number of network contacts. Using analytical tools and agent-based simulation, we show that this seemingly subtle difference can have profound implications for emergent dynamics of cultural dissemination. In particular, we show that within the framework of our model online communication fosters cultural diversity to a larger degree than offline communication and it increases chances that individuals and subgroups become culturally isolated from their network contacts
Dynamics in online social networks
An increasing number of today's social interactions occurs using online
social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become
extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the
character of the service they provide to online users. For instance, Facebook
can be seen mainly as a platform for keeping in touch with close friends and
relatives, Twitter is used to propagate and receive news, LinkedIn facilitates
the maintenance of professional contacts, Flickr gathers amateurs and
professionals of photography, etc. Albeit different, all these online platforms
share an ingredient that pervades all their applications. There exists an
underlying social network that allows their users to keep in touch with each
other and helps to engage them in common activities or interactions leading to
a better fulfillment of the service's purposes. This is the reason why these
platforms share a good number of functionalities, e.g., personal communication
channels, broadcasted status updates, easy one-step information sharing, news
feeds exposing broadcasted content, etc. As a result, online social networks
are an interesting field to study an online social behavior that seems to be
generic among the different online services. Since at the bottom of these
services lays a network of declared relations and the basic interactions in
these platforms tend to be pairwise, a natural methodology for studying these
systems is provided by network science. In this chapter we describe some of the
results of research studies on the structure, dynamics and social activity in
online social networks. We present them in the interdisciplinary context of
network science, sociological studies and computer science.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, book chapte
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Diverse virtual social networks: Implications for remote software testing teams
This paper evaluates offshore outsourcing in the IT testing industry and determines what conditions determine its success. There is particular focus on the influence of diversity in teams on group relationships. Two studies are described: the first, investigated the perceptions of professional software testers on the critical factors of offshore outsourcing; and the second study looked at the ability for diverse teams to form close working relationships through virtual networks. We find that overt diversity factors inhibit interaction across nationality boundaries. The limitations of virtual networks for fostering personal communications is apparent in preventing group members from overcoming the initial aversion to mix with out-group members, which could be achieved with closer and more personal communications between members with different diversity factors in normal face to face communications. Where software testing teams are outsourced globaly, and must rely on virtual communications, there seems potential for significant difficulties in developing close working relationships, which on the one hand, can be negative for group cohesion, but one the other hand, can be positive for encouraging imparitality
Complex Network Analysis of State Spaces for Random Boolean Networks
We apply complex network analysis to the state spaces of random Boolean
networks (RBNs). An RBN contains Boolean elements each with inputs. A
directed state space network (SSN) is constructed by linking each dynamical
state, represented as a node, to its temporal successor. We study the
heterogeneity of an SSN at both local and global scales, as well as
sample-to-sample fluctuations within an ensemble of SSNs. We use in-degrees of
nodes as a local topological measure, and the path diversity [Phys. Rev. Lett.
98, 198701 (2007)] of an SSN as a global topological measure. RBNs with exhibit non-trivial fluctuations at both local and global scales,
while K=2 exhibits the largest sample-to-sample, possibly non-self-averaging,
fluctuations. We interpret the observed ``multi scale'' fluctuations in the
SSNs as indicative of the criticality and complexity of K=2 RBNs. ``Garden of
Eden'' (GoE) states are nodes on an SSN that have in-degree zero. While
in-degrees of non-GoE nodes for SSNs can assume any integer value between
0 and , for K=1 all the non-GoE nodes in an SSN have the same in-degree
which is always a power of two
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