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    Online Social Networks: Human Cognitive Constraints in Facebook and Twitter Personal Graphs
    Online Social Networks: Human Cognitive Constraints in Facebook and Twitter Personal Graphs
    Online Social Networks: Human Cognitive Constraints in Facebook and Twitter Personal Graphs
    Ebook206 pages2 hours

    Online Social Networks: Human Cognitive Constraints in Facebook and Twitter Personal Graphs

    By Valerio Arnaboldi, Andrea Passarella, Marco Conti and Robin I.M. Dunbar

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    About this ebook

    Online Social Networks: Human Cognitive Constraints in Facebook and Twitter provides new insights into the structural properties of personal online social networks and the mechanisms underpinning human online social behavior.

    As the availability of digital communication data generated by social media is revolutionizing the field of social networks analysis, the text discusses the use of large- scale datasets to study the structural properties of online ego networks, to compare them with the properties of general human social networks, and to highlight additional properties.

    Users will find the data collected and conclusions drawn useful during design or research service initiatives that involve online and mobile social network environments.

    • Provides an analysis of the structural properties of ego networks in online social networks
    • Presents quantitative evidence of the Dunbar’s number in online environments
    • Discusses original structural and dynamic properties of human social network through OSN analysis
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateSep 25, 2015
    ISBN9780128030424
    Online Social Networks: Human Cognitive Constraints in Facebook and Twitter Personal Graphs
    Author

    Valerio Arnaboldi

    Dr. Valerio Arnaboldi Ph.D is currently a Researcher in the field of social networks analysis with the Ubiquitous Internet group of the Institute for Informatics and Telematics (IIT) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). Previously, he worked as a visiting Ph.D. student at the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford (UK), under the supervision of Prof. Robin I.M. Dunbar. His research interests include social network analysis, social relationships modeling and context- and social-based services for networking solutions on mobile platforms.

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      Book preview

      Online Social Networks - Valerio Arnaboldi

      grant.

      Chapter 1

      Introduction

      Abstract

      In this chapter, we introduce the concept of ‘social network’, and we provide an intuitive and sharp distinction between ‘offline’ and ‘online’ social networks. Then, we describe the main features of Facebook and Twitter, the two online social networks (OSNs) discussed in this book. We show how they are actively contributing to the cyber-physical world convergence, and we motivate the need of novel analyses on the structural properties of OSNs. These are important for understanding human social behaviour in general, and for the creation of novel online social networking platforms that are more centred on human social needs. In particular, the analysis of personal social networks of individuals (called ‘ego networks’) in OSNs can tell us the extent to which the use of social media is impacting on the capacity of humans to socialise. We introduce the main results found for offline social networks, which indicate that the structural properties of ego networks are determined by the constrained nature of the brain, according to the social brain hypothesis. Then, we present the aim and structure of the book, which is to provide an extensive discussion about the structural properties of ego networks in Facebook and Twitter, and to assess the effects of cognitive limits of the human brain on OSNs.

      Keywords

      Online and offline social networks

      Facebook

      Twitter

      Cyber-physical world

      Social brain hypothesis

      1.1 Offline and Online Social Networks

      In its classical definition, a ‘social network’ represents a social structure containing a set of actors and a set of dyadic ties identifying social relationships existing between these actors in the considered social context (e.g. a workplace, a country, the scientific community) [1]. Social network analysis is aimed at understanding social phenomena arising in the contexts in question (e.g. the circulation of new ideas in a workplace, the spread of diseases or the creation of collaborations among scientists) by looking at structural properties of these networks.

      The recent advent of social media, like Facebook and Twitter, is creating new opportunities for the analysis of social networks. In fact, some social media are now so widely used that they can represent a large portion of an individual’s entire social world, and their analysis could therefore provide new insights into our social behaviour. In contrast to more traditional means of communication (such as face-to-face interaction or communication by phone), social media are gradually generating a completely new ‘online’ social environment, where social relationships do not necessarily map pre-existing relationships established face-to-face, but can also be created and maintained only in the virtual world. To highlight the differences between these social environments, we define ‘online’ social networks (hereinafter OSNs) as the social networks formed of users of specific social media and the social links existing between them, and ‘offline’ social networks as all the other social networks not mediated by the use of social media (e.g. networks formed through face-to-face interactions and phone calls). Our definition of OSNs emphasises the capacity that social media offer for projecting ourselves in the virtual world of online communications, something that other communication services are not able to do. This distinction between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ social networks will be extensively used in this book to analyse and discuss the differences between the social environments they embody.

      Facebook and Twitter surely represent nowadays the most important and the largest OSNs in the world, and they will be the main subject of discussion in this book. For the readers who are less familiar with them, we give a brief description of their main features, introducing the terms that we shall encounter in the rest of the book.

      Facebook is the most used online social networking service in the world, with more than 1.3 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2015 [2]. It was founded in 2004 and is open to everyone over 13 years old. Facebook provides several features for social interaction. Users have a profile which reports their personal information, and can be customised. Connected to their profile, users have a special message board called wall, which reports all the status messages they create (status updates) as well as messages received from other users (posts). Posts can contain multimedia information such as pictures, URLs and videos. Users can comment on posts to create discussions with other users or to add information to them. To be able to communicate with another user (e.g. writing posts on her wall and commenting on her posts or photos), a user must obtain her friendship. A friendship is a bi-directional relation that requires the acceptance of the involved users. Users can visualise a summary of the activity of their friends through a special page called a news feed. This page presents real-time notifications describing the activities performed by friends, including posts and the comments they create, photos they add, etc. Direct communication between Facebook users is provided through posts, which can be written on the wall of other users. Posts can also contain references to multiple users. Private communications are provided by a chat called messenger. Facebook also provides other mechanisms to communicate online, such as voice and video calls. A widely used feature of Facebook is the like button, which allows people to express their favourable opinion about contents (e.g. posts, pictures).

      Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service founded in 2006, with roughly 300 million monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2014 [3]. In Twitter, users can post short messages (with at most 140 characters) called tweets. Users can automatically receive notifications of new tweets created by other users by ‘following’ them (i.e. creating a subscription to their notifications). People following a user are called her followers, whilst the set of people followed by the user are her friends.

      Tweets can be enriched with multimedia content (i.e. URLs, videos and pictures) and by some special marks. Specifically, a tweet can reference one or more users with a special mark called a mention. Users mentioned in a tweet automatically receive a notification, even though they are not followers of the tweet’s author. Users can also reply to tweets. In this case, a tweet is generated with an implicit mention to the author of the replied

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