Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and online communities.
He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. You can follow him on Twitter at mich8elwu.
Welcome back from the Memorial Day long weekend! In my last post, I promised that I’d cover some new topics this time, so I am going to share with you a research project that I’ve been conducting recently on the relationship between social networks and communities.
Since 2008, “social media” has become a heavily-used buzz word in the corporate world. The question is “what is social media?” Many seem to equate social media to Facebook-liked social networking sites; others seem to think that they are blogs, the Twitter family of applications for micro-blogging, Flickr, YouTube, or similar type of content sharing Web 2.0 applications. Yet, answers to this question may still range from social collaboration sites (like Wikipedia, Delicious, or Digg) to online communities (like those we host for our enterprise clients or Yahoo! Answer).
Well, they are all correct to some extent, and these are functional classifications of social media. Author and blogger Brian Solis, introduced another classification of social media, based on the types of conversation. He called it the conversation prism. However, if you want to understand social media from a relational and social anthropological perspective, you will find that there are really only two major types of social media:
Human social networks and communities actually pre-date their online counterpart for millennia. Both are very well-established and robust social structures that have survived the test of time. And they have emerged and reemerged as civilizations collapse and rise. Humans are naturally predisposed to gravitate to and desire this type of interaction.
For this initial post of the mini blog series, I hope to offer you a perspective that lets you see some basic differentiating features between these two types of social media. Later on, I will show you what we can learn about them from studies in social anthropology.
Everyone has their own social network (whether online or offline). Everyone has friends, families, and people they are acquainted with. An online social networking site simply makes our social networks visible to others who are not in our immediate network.
So the single most important feature that distinguishes a social network from a community is how people are held together on these sites. In a social network, people are held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships, such as kinship, friendship, classmates, colleagues, business partners, etc. The connections are built one at a time (i.e. you connect directly with another user). The primary reason that people join a social networking site is to maintain old relationships and establish new ones to expand their network. With this knowledge, it should be obvious why Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are social networks as opposed to communities.
One interesting feature about people’s social networks is that they are extremely unique. It is actually very difficult to fake a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, because your friends (or who you connect to) will collectively identify you. Moreover, because people generally do not compartmentalize their life (unless you are a secret agent for the CIA or some cryptic government agencies), people typically have only one social network. Even for the CIA agents, it could be argued that they have only one social network; it’s just that their network has two or more components that have little overlap.
Unlike social networks, communities (both online and offline) are more interesting from a social anthropological perspective, because they often consist of people from all walks of life that seem to have no relationship at all. Yet, as we’ve learned from history, communities are very robust social structures. So what is it that holds these communities together?
Communities are held together by common interest. It may be a hobby, something the community members are passionate about, a common goal, a common project, or merely the preference for a similar lifestyle, geographical location, or profession. Clearly people join the community because they care about this common interest that glues the community members together. Some stay because they felt the urge to contribute to the cause; others come because they can benefit from being part of the community.
Due to the multifaceted lifestyle of modern living, any individual is often a part of many different communities. Moreover, communities can overlap and are often nested. For example, a geographical community, say a town, may contain sub-communities living in different parts of the town that are connected by a finer geographical granularity. But at the same time, the same town may contain several different ethnic communities that are connected by the ethnicity.
Now, do you see why Yelp, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, the blogosphere, etc., are just communities? Yelp is a community of, originally, food enthusiasts; where as members of the Wikipedia community are passionate about cause of the internet encyclopedia project. YouTube and Flickr are nested communities of video and photography enthusiasts respectively, and they may belong to other sub-communities within the YouTube and/or Flickr community. These sub-communities may simply be your friends and relatives, or people are interested in high dynamics range photography (with 61,000 members) or time lapse videos.
In Summary
Social Networks (see Figure 1) are:
- Held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships between individuals. So you know everyone that is directly connected to you.
- Each person has one social network. But a person can have different social graphs depending on what relationship we want to focus on (see Social Network Analysis 101).
- They have a network structure.
Communities (see Figure 2) are:
- Held together by some common interests of a large group of people. Although there may be pre-existing interpersonal relationship between members of a community, it is not required. So new members usually do not know most of the people in the community.
- Any one person may be part of many communities.
- They have overlapping and nested structure.
Now that you know the basic difference between social networks and communities from a relational perspective, next time we can discuss more interesting questions, such as the dynamics of tie formation, or what it means to businesses. I haven’t yet decided what I will write, so let me know if there are any interesting topics that you want me to dig into. In the mean time, comments, questions and critiques are all welcomed.
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