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Libraries as Social Network Hubs

Smart Mobs points us to a new study by the New England Complex Science Institute. It is called “From Centrality to Temporary Fame: Dynamic Centrality in Complex Networks by Dan Braha and Yaneer Bar-Yam and appears in the November issue of Complexity. To view the article online, please click here.
From the NECSI Press release:
“If you’re one of sixty million or so monthly visitors to social networking websites like MySpace or Facebook, you’ve probably noticed them— “network hubs,” people who have many more contacts than everybody else. While most users have a few or a few hundred connections, a tiny percentage of users have thousands upon thousands. Maybe, with a twinge of jealousy, you’ve wondered what makes them so special. Is it about coolness? Influence? Popularity?
How about “none of the above”? Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the New England Complex Systems Institute have discovered that social networks and the roles of the individuals that make them up vary drastically from day to day. Until now, scientists have largely thought of networks as fairly stable, changing only slightly over time–say, when someone makes a new contact.
The reality of networks isn’t as simple as that. Dan Braha and Yaneer Bar-Yam studied the e-mails sent among thousands of users over the course of four months. When they looked at the e-mail traffic on any given day, they found that some people were hubs just as they expected. The surprise was that the identity of the hubs changed from day to day. An individual who sent and received relatively few e-mails on one day could become a hub of the network the next. Hubs rarely stayed hubs for any length of time.
“The results were astounding,” Braha says. “How important someone is changes so fast we might be better off saying it is like ’15 minutes of fame’.”
“The most influential people are not the ones with the biggest address books,” says Bar-Yam. “What really matters is who is talking to whom. By looking only at who knows whom you lose a lot of important details about when people actually talk to each other.”
Scientists have found that the existence of hubs is not unique to social networks. Hubs exist in a variety of networks, including technological and biological. These hubs are particularly interesting to researchers, because they allow information and messages to propagate quickly throughout the entire network. Hoping to take advantage of this fact, network-based strategies have been proposed in areas ranging from public health (immunizing certain individuals to slow the spread of disease) to marketing (selectively advertising to a small group of “opinion leaders”).
While it’s interesting to note that the nodes of netyworks are malleable, this is an even better opportunity for libraries. Libraries know their users and, with permission or membership, we can create nodes and participate in nodes without having to ‘own’ them, ‘over-manage’ them, or over moderate them. We can create ecologies for knowledge sharing, discovery and networking that empowers our communities to succeed.
After reading this short article, I feel that our early library forays into social networking environments with blogging, MySpace or Facebook et al are even more important to watch and learn from. My learning so far is that we need a wider understanding of what ‘friends’ means in these environments. It seems to mean everything from contacts, to acquaintances, classmates, professional coleagues, family and friends. This wider definition of ‘friend’ means that their is a wider role for our networks, cardholders and learners.
Whole lot of learning going on…
Stephen

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Posted on: January 3, 2007, 10:30 am Category: Uncategorized

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  1. So, is your library doing anything to enhance the social networks? Like network weaving… connecting/introducing people to each other?
    How about “birds of a feather” sessions… like every third Wednesday invite people who check out Mysteries to a F2F or on-line discussion of recent releases.
    See http://www.networkweaving.com/blog for various examples.