Social network

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics.

Social networks and the analysis of them is an inherently interdisciplinary academic field which emerged from social psychology, sociology, statistics, and graph theory. Georg Simmel authored early structural theories in sociology emphasizing the dynamics of triads and "web of group affiliations."Jacob Moreno is credited with developing the first sociograms in the 1930s to study interpersonal relationships. These approaches were mathematically formalized in the 1950s and theories and methods of social networks became pervasive in the social and behavioral sciences by the 1980s.Social network analysis is now one of the major paradigms in contemporary sociology, and is also employed in a number of other social and formal sciences. Together with other complex networks, it forms part of the nascent field of network science.

Social media

Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people or companies to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. Social media is defined as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Furthermore, social media depend on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities, and individuals. These changes are the focus of the emerging field of technoself studies. Social media differ from traditional or industrial media in many ways, including quality,reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. Social media operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers). This is in contrast to traditional media that operates under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers).

Nicholas A. Christakis

Nicholas A. Christakis (born May 7, 1962) is an American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic and biosocial determinants of behavior, health, and longevity. He is the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. He directs the Human Nature Lab, and he is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.

He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, and he was named a Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010.

In 2009, he was named to the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009 and again in 2010, Christakis was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

Education

Christakis received a B.S. in biology from Yale University in 1984, where he won the Russell Henry Chittenden Prize. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1989, winning the Bowdoin Prize on graduation.

Social Networks (journal)

Social Networks is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on social network theory. The editors-in-chief are P. Doreian (University of Pittsburgh) and M. Everett (University of Manchester). It was established in 1979 and is currently published by Elsevier.

Abstracting and indexing

Social Networks is abstracted and indexed in:

According to the Journal Citation Reports, its 2011 impact factor is 2.931, ranking it 6th out of 137 journals in the category "Sociology".

References

External links

Social

The term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms as applied to populations of humans and other animals. It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

Etymology

The word "Social" derives from the Latin word socii ("allies"). It is particularly derived from the Italian Socii states, historical allies of the Roman Republic (although they rebelled against Rome in the Social War of 91-88 BC).

Definition

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term "social" is used in many different senses and regarded as a fuzzy concept, referring among other things to:

Attitudes, orientations, or behaviors which take the interests, intentions, or needs of other people into account (in contrast to anti-social behaviour) has played some role in defining the idea or the principle. For instance terms like social realism, social justice, social constructivism, social psychology, social anarchism and social capital imply that there is some social process involved or considered, a process that is not there in regular, "non-social" realism, justice, constructivism, psychology, anarchism, or capital.