Community vs. Social Network

I like this classification Michael. I would add that there are communities that come together through social networks. For example, a group of people passionate about cycling may find each other through Twitter and develop personal bonds. In that case, the community is tied together through the social network.

Hello Patric,

Glad you find my work useful in your PhD studies.

First, when you said social communities, do you just mean online communities? If that is the case, then I don't think they are separated. People belong to social networks through pre-established interpersonal relationships, but we also at the same time belong to many communities through common interests with other people.

You can take a look at a later article that I've written on this subject that explains why there are communities in social networks, but there are also social networks within communities. You can find the discussion in this blog article:

Cyber Anthropology: A Unified View of Communities and Social Networks

I don't know what your PhD thesis is on. But feel free to explore the rest of this series on Cyber Anthropology. I hope to see you on Lithosphere in the future.

Hello Dan,

Thank you for commenting.

You are absolutely right. In fact this will be a topic for the next few article that I am already writing, so I will only answer you briefly here. It's great that you are already thinking ahead.

People can definitely meet on communities or social network. But community is where they develop these relationships. Community can form anywhere, even on a social network site. It is a natural tendency for human to congregate around similar interest and goals. There are many interesting dynamics between communities and social network that I will cover later. Both of them have very roles in the human socieity; that is why they are the most stable social structure in human history.

So stay tuned!

Hello   Nigel,

Thank you for the question.

As I've mentioned in my reply to Dan above, communities can form pretty much anywhere. And according to the definition in this article FB Groups would be a community, despite the fact that Facebook  is a social network. Because you don't necessarily know everyone in the FB group. You can have many FB groups based on your interest. So it is definitely a community.

Social Network and Community are not mutually exclusive. We are part of 1 social network, but we are also part of many community. Strictly from a social anthroplogical view, there is a very important reason for us to have both of these social structures. These more indepth topics will be cover in a miniseries of article that I will post later.

The question you've ask is precisely why I decided to start this mini-series in the first place. The answer is more involved and not trivial. It has to do with the dynamics of how ties form and the differential tendency to engage with friends with different tie strength. So if you follow my blog, you will find the answer to your question: why FB groups are not very effective. Stay tuned!

Hi Michael,

Thanks for another great post!

You write, "Now, do you see why Yelp, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, the blogosphere, etc., are just communities?"  Seems like Yelp is blending both Community and Social Networking features. Yelp allows me to "follow" people I don't know but also to invite/connect with my friends from my address books.  And now through Facebook's instant personalization, my Facebook social graph can be automatically imported to Yelp.  I can see the activity of friend's and those who I follow, but don't know personally, on the site.

Hello Skip,

Welcome back. Glad to see your comment again.

The common interest in a community is crucial. Without it, most communities will fall apart.

To tag along your comment, I will quote from the renowned anthropologist, Margaret Mead.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

The intensity of the common interest is what fuel these "small group of thoughtful committed citizens" who in turn make our communities work.

Michael,
Good post. Enjoyed reading this post - a great topic and you brought up some interesting views on both.

I just wanted to expand on the question that I had tweeted to you a few days ago - "Can you not have communities within your social networks and social networking within your community?"

I agree with the essence of your classification that social networks are based on 'relationships' and communities are based on 'shared space/interests'. The one point I don't completely agree with you is regarding the statement "the connections are built one at a time (i.e. you connect directly  with another user)." My own thinking on this is that relationships in a social network need not always be direct and consequently the connections are also tiered - those made by you directly and those made by your direct connections. 

The dynamics between these are very interesting. As you yourself mention, the two are not mutually exclusive. And when I thought about it, it was easy to see that one can exist within the other (and hence my original question to you). I would even venture out and say that in some ways there is a symbiotic relationship between the two.

When a person joins a community, initially the reason for joining is the shared interest. However, how long that person stays as part of that community is greatly dependent on the kind of social network they build up within that community. In pure marketing terms, I would say that shared interest is a key driver from an acquisition point of view for a community but not as big of a driver from a retention standpoint -- of course, this purely my opinion and folks are free to poke holes or disagree with me:-) .On the flip side, in my social network sphere how strong my ties are with the different nodes/networks is dependent on if I feel a sense of community with the "nodes" (people in this case).

Anyway, there is a lot to talk on this than in a few paragraphs. I am looking forward to your future posts.

Regards,

Ned

Hello Ned,

Thank you for posting your question here. As you can already see in the comments, there are some really inquisitive readers here and some of the questions you asked on twitter have already been addressed, either directly or indirectly.

To your point on the indirect (2nd degree) connections as being part of your relationships, I would have to challenge you a bit on that. Since the social network connects everyone on this planet, you kind of have to make a cut off some where. I used a very strict cut off and considered only those that are directly connected to you as a your network. And those are the relationship that I considered truly your relationships.

As I understand it, you want to extend that to include 2nd degrees, and maybe even 3rd degrees. But my question then is why stop at 2nd (or 3rd) degree. Why not 3rd, or 4th. If you continue to follow that argument, then everyone is related to you, because everyone is only about 6 to 7 degrees apart from you. If you meet a friend of your friend and become friends with him/jher, then s/he would become a 1st degree (direct) connection. Besides (a minor point) what do you call the relation friends of friends? If you want to consider that as a valid relationship, why not have friends of friends of friends as a relationship as well. We certainly don't refer to people that way. If you know them they are your friends (your direct connection), if not they are not your friends, even if they are just 2 degrees away from you. You may know them from a friend, so you call them friend of friend, but the fact that you know them already implicitly implies that they are your friends now. Before you know them, you simply don't know them. Anyway, this is my rigorous view (part of my training as a mathematician). But feel free to challenge me...

Yes, the dynamics between communities and social netwroks is definitely very interesting, and it is a topic that I will write about in later post (actually they are already written). As in my reply to  Mark_Kaufman, there is definitely a symbiotic relationship between the two. And your point about acquisition and retension is definitely on the right track. I'm glad you thought about it that way. It definitely reaffirms my research.

There are definitely a lot of loose ends given what I've posted now. Maybe I shouldn't split up my long-ish article into such short chunks of posts, and that it would be more clear to post the  whole thing as one giant article. I have mix feeling about that though... I hope that as I publish the later posts, things will clear up as we go along.

I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to post the question here. Hope to see you next time.

Michael,
Excellent points - and welcome the challenge :-). A friendly cerebral tug-of-war is always good in my opinion as it fosters better learning and knowledge exchange.

So coming back to the topic of direct/indirect connections. We both agree that relationships are key to social networks. Our different point of views I think arise from the different lens we are looking with. You are looking at it from a "connections" perspective, whereas I am looking at from a "connections & interactions" perspective.

My response to some of the points (focusing solely on the online world as offline is another story).

a. You said, "Since the social network connects everyone on this planet, you kind of have to make a cut off some where". Well, I don't think you necessarily have to make a conscious cut-off.  While you might be 'connected' to everyone in the planet theoretically, I think your social network is made up of those nodes that are influenced by you. These could be those directly connected with you and those who interact with you but are not directly connected. For example, I constantly get invites from folks in linkedin not part of my direct network to join a certain group. I do think of them as a part of my social network since they are "aware" of me and my interactions.

b. Which brings up two other points: (a)Social networks are not static, and (b) You only have partial control over your network. To the point you made about direct connections and truly 'your' relationships, I agree that this makes up the core and is relatively more stable (though constantly expanding). However, the periphery of your social network is always in fluctuation as you have no control over who and when someone (not directly connected with you) comes under your influence and initiate an interaction. Now I will agree that in many cases, these non-direct connections turn into direct connections if the interactions continue.

c. While connections are important, [I think] your social network is determined by the type of connections you have and the extent of reciprocity. You and me might be connected with 5 individuals but it makes a big difference in my eyes who those individuals are (a John Doe vs Bill Gates for example) and to what extent they identify with and reciprocate your interactions.

Anyway, these are my viewpoints based on observations rather than a rigorous empirical research. And irrespective of whether our opinions converge or not, I think you have an excellent blog with some cool information and so you should continue to pursue your path based on what you believe in.

Regards,
Ned

Hello Ned,

Glad you carried on the discussion.

I’ll add a few more comment to some of the great points you’ve made. Some of these I agree with you, and of those points where I disagree, I will try to explain the differences.

(a). First, social network connecting the whole planet is actually not a theoretical construct. There are pretty convincing hard data and evidence for this. But I guess that depends on what you mean by a social network. This proved a point that in most cases we need a definition. I guess that is just ingrained in my mathematics training. Because what we can conclude depends on the precise definition. In traditional sociology literatures, social network are often defined to be a collection of entities that are connected by the relationship among them. So a person’s social network includes all his friends, relatives, colleagues, acquaintance, both online and offline. This basically includes everyone that a person knows on a first name basis.

Second, the online social network (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) is really just a social graph that represents a part of the whole social network, because it only show a part of the social network by accentuating a particular type of relationships (see Social Network Analysis 101). And these online social graphs certainly that does NOT connect everyone on Earth.

I believe that a rigorous definition is important if you want to do some empirical and theoretical work. Anyone can simply talk about these topics casually, and a general understanding is sufficient to get the idea across without the details. But for deep theoretical abstraction and synthesis based on empirical data, we often need a precise definition in order to make accurate and rigorous predictions. For example, If I were to take your perspective and include the notion of interaction or influence, then I would define something like interaction network or influence network. It is probably more descriptive that way, and we don’t have to qualify which definition of social network we meant and whether our data is generally valid for which definition of social network.

(b). I agree 100% that social network is not static. In fact there is a whole field of knowledge pioneered by CMU professor, Kathleen Carley, called Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA), which combines statistics and time series analysis with social network analysis. Another very interesting topic that I would love to cover in a later post.

I believed what you said is mathematically equivalent to mine. Only under my definition of personal social network, I would simply said that everyone has full control over who he wants to be friend with b/c his personal social network include only those who are directly connected to him. But he may not have control over the 2nd degree network (maybe we can defined this to be his personal interaction network), or the 3rd degree network (maybe we can define this to be his influence network).

(c). I agree 100% with this too. In fact the relationship that I will focus on is the one that are reciprocated. If you are familiar with social network analysis (SNA), the John Doe vs Bill Gates distinction will naturally come out from an eigenvector centrality analysis of the social network. Influence can bleed over to graph neighbors on a the social graph, and this is captured by SNA as I’ve illustrated in an earlier series of blogs on influencers identification, this particular post shows you the result of the computation.

Thank you so much for taking the time to voice your view points. They are definitely valuable and offers a different perspective. I hope we will have opportunities to meet in the real world to discuss some of these interesting topics. Hope to see you back on Lithosphere later.