47,056 research outputs found
On Facebook, most ties are weak
Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological
challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is
evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate
communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human
relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the
framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13
Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online
social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to
predict the strength of ties. The approaches being used require handling
user-generated data that is often not publicly available due to privacy
concerns. Here, we propose an alternative definition of weak and strong ties
that requires knowledge of only the topology of the social network (such as who
is a friend of whom on Facebook), relying on the fact that online social
networks, or OSNs, tend to fragment into communities. We thus suggest
classifying as weak ties those edges linking individuals belonging to different
communities and strong ties as those connecting users in the same community. We
tested this definition on a large network representing part of the Facebook
social graph and studied how weak and strong ties affect the
information-diffusion process. Our findings suggest individuals in OSNs
self-organize to create well-connected communities, while weak ties yield
cohesion and optimize the coverage of information spread.Comment: Accepted version of the manuscript before ACM editorial work. Check
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179820-on-facebook-most-ties-are-weak/
for the final versio
Unsociability as Boundary Regulation on Social Network Sites
This study approaches online social networking from the opposite direction, focusing on unsociability, in an attempt to find out how friendships are negotiated and terminated online. The research data was obtained via an online survey (N=107) targeted to SNS users. The findings show that Facebook is closely connected to offline social life, and the fading of offline relationship was the most common reason for cutting ties on Facebook. Usually, the people who were unfriended represented weak ties. Even though unfriending can be considered as the hardest form of unsociability, it was more commonly used than restricting content from certain people. On Twitter and other SNSs, the relationships were less personal. Therefore, âunfollowâ, âblockâ and other unsocial features were used to filter and regulate the content subscribed to. Particularly on Facebook, attention should be paid to developing affordances that would enable the system to better match the dynamic and complex nature of social relationships
Weak ties: Subtle role of information diffusion in online social networks
As a social media, online social networks play a vital role in the social
information diffusion. However, due to its unique complexity, the mechanism of
the diffusion in online social networks is different from the ones in other
types of networks and remains unclear to us. Meanwhile, few works have been
done to reveal the coupled dynamics of both the structure and the diffusion of
online social networks. To this end, in this paper, we propose a model to
investigate how the structure is coupled with the diffusion in online social
networks from the view of weak ties. Through numerical experiments on
large-scale online social networks, we find that in contrast to some previous
research results, selecting weak ties preferentially to republish cannot make
the information diffuse quickly, while random selection can achieve this goal.
However, when we remove the weak ties gradually, the coverage of the
information will drop sharply even in the case of random selection. We also
give a reasonable explanation for this by extra analysis and experiments.
Finally, we conclude that weak ties play a subtle role in the information
diffusion in online social networks. On one hand, they act as bridges to
connect isolated local communities together and break through the local
trapping of the information. On the other hand, selecting them as preferential
paths to republish cannot help the information spread further in the network.
As a result, weak ties might be of use in the control of the virus spread and
the private information diffusion in real-world applications.Comment: Final version published in PR
Keep Your Friends Close and Your Facebook Friends Closer: A Multiplex Network Approach to the Analysis of Offline and Online Social Ties
Social media allow for an unprecedented amount of interaction between people online. A fundamental aspect of human social behavior, however, is the tendency of people to
associate themselves with like-minded individuals, forming
homogeneous social circles both online and offline. In this
work, we apply a new model that allows us to distinguish
between social ties of varying strength, and to observe evidence of homophily with regards to politics, music, health,
residential sector & year in college, within the online and
offline social network of 74 college students. We present a
multiplex network approach to social tie strength, here applied to mobile communication data - calls, text messages,
and co-location, allowing us to dimensionally identify relationships by considering the number of communication channels utilized between students. We find that strong social ties
are characterized by maximal use of communication channels, while weak ties by minimal use. We are able to identify
75% of close friendships, 90% of weaker ties, and 90% of
Facebook friendships as compared to reported ground truth.
We then show that stronger ties exhibit greater profile similarity than weaker ones. Apart from high homogeneity in social
circles with respect to political and health aspects, we observe
strong homophily driven by music, residential sector and year
in college. Despite Facebook friendship being highly dependent on residence and year, exposure to less homogeneous
content can be found in the online rather than the offline social circles of students, most notably in political and music
aspects
A Promising Practice: Using Facebook as a Communication and Social Networking Tool
Individuals with autism often face barriers to social interaction. Residing in a rural environment can compound these difficulties for individuals diagnosed with autism. Some of the reasons include transportation problems and small social networks, in addition to the characteristics of autism. This article discusses a promising practice for supporting the communication and social opportunities for individuals with autism. The authors examined how Facebook supported the social interaction of Jacob, a 28-year old with High Functioning Autism. The findings suggested that, through Facebook, Jacob increased the quantity and quality of social ties he had with others. The authors argue that although online social networking has limitations, with supervision, tools such as Facebook hold potential for developing and increasing social interaction for individuals with High Functioning Autism /Asperger Syndrome
The best of both worlds? Online ties and the alternating use of social network sites in the context of migration
While an ever-growing body of research is concerned with user behavior on individual social network sites (SNSs)âmostly Facebookâstudies addressing an alternating use of two or more SNS are rare. Here, we investigate the relationship between alternating SNS use and social capital in the context of migration. Alternating SNS use avoids some of the problems associated with large networks located on one site; in particular the management of different social or cultural spheres. Not only does this strategy hold potential for increased social capital, it also provides a particular incentive for migrants faced with the challenge of staying in touch with back home and managing a new social environment. Two survey studies are presented that focus on the relationship between alternating SNS use and online ties in a migrant context involving Indian nationals. Study 1 looked at migration within India, whereas Study 2 compared international with domestic SNS users. In both studies, alternating SNS use added to the prediction of online network size and accounted for differences in network size found for migrant and non-migrant users. Differences were due to the number of peripheral ties, rather than core ties. Findings suggest that alternating SNS use may constitute a compensatory strategy that helps to overcome lower levels of socializing represented through a single SNS
Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give
Analyzes data on Facebook user activity, including patterns in sending friend requests, adding content, and "liking" their friends' content; the interconnectedness of friends; and links between the number of friends, Facebook activity, and social support
Egomunities, Exploring Socially Cohesive Person-based Communities
In the last few years, there has been a great interest in detecting
overlapping communities in complex networks, which is understood as dense
groups of nodes featuring a low outbound density. To date, most methods used to
compute such communities stem from the field of disjoint community detection by
either extending the concept of modularity to an overlapping context or by
attempting to decompose the whole set of nodes into several possibly
overlapping subsets. In this report we take an orthogonal approach by
introducing a metric, the cohesion, rooted in sociological considerations. The
cohesion quantifies the community-ness of one given set of nodes, based on the
notions of triangles - triplets of connected nodes - and weak ties, instead of
the classical view using only edge density. A set of nodes has a high cohesion
if it features a high density of triangles and intersects few triangles with
the rest of the network. As such, we introduce a numerical characterization of
communities: sets of nodes featuring a high cohesion. We then present a new
approach to the problem of overlapping communities by introducing the concept
of ego-munities, which are subjective communities centered around a given node,
specifically inside its neighborhood. We build upon the cohesion to construct a
heuristic algorithm which outputs a node's ego-munities by attempting to
maximize their cohesion. We illustrate the pertinence of our method with a
detailed description of one person's ego-munities among Facebook friends. We
finally conclude by describing promising applications of ego-munities such as
information inference and interest recommendations, and present a possible
extension to cohesion in the case of weighted networks
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