Information Technology

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

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Humans have been forming social networks since pre- historic times. The first networks were based around the family, clan, or tribe to ensure the survival of the group. In the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament, God instructs Moses how to organize the Hebrews and thus structure the nomads’ social interactions. Plato and Aristotle described the social structure of ancient Greece, and Alexander organized his armies to conquer the known world. The Church in Rome created a hier- archical structure to manage its vast networks of clergy and believers. The military and corporate world have followed these models with the goal of structuring their members’ activities to coordinate their patterns of in- teraction to guarantee the most efficient and effective outcomes possible. Humans are social animals. We are members of groups. Throughout history the process of networking took place through face-to-face contact. Later we added written messages, and then electronic messaging—the telegraph, telephone, film, radio, and television. Today, we have the Internet and the various message systems that keep us in touch with one another—the process known as social networking. Our social networks are ubiquitous, determining who we are, with whom we communicate, what we think, and how we act. This en-
cyclopedia is about social networks and their roles in history, society, our contemporary lives, and the future. I invite you to read through its pages and take a fascinat- ing journey into the world of social networks. While the foundations for the study of networks (graphs) can be traced back to the Swiss mathematical Leonhard Euler (1707–83), it was not until the writings of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a German sociologist whose studies pioneered the concept of social structure, that key precursors of social network analysis were in place. Generally, the origin of social network analy- sis is attributed to Jacob Moreno’s development of the “sociogram” and founding of the field of sociometry in the 1930s. Sociometry is the measurement of inter- personal relations in small groups. These relations may be displayed in a sociogram, a graphic representation in which people or other social units are presented as points or circles and the relationships among the people as lines between the corresponding points. According to Stan Wasserman and Katherine Faust, this develop- ment led to two core aspects of social network analysis: the visual display of group structure and a probabilistic model of outcomes due to group structure.

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Publisher

: ., 2015

Collation

1-1113

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-1-4129-7911-5

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NONE

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

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