Are you in the same network?

A recent article in NY Times caught my eye: Mobile phone networks are changing people’s social relations by their “talk-free-in-the-same-network” gimmick. When people switch network, they have to take their friends’ network into consideration and they may well lose their friends if they switch to the wrong one.

This is a perfect example of technology interfering human relations. Or more specifically, the physical (phone) network influences the social network. This sounds very much like McLuhan’s technological determinism, but the truth is, any technology has certain affordances and constraints. Harold Innis call this “the bias of communications”. Larry Lessig says “code is law”. And I say that human behavior is conditioned by technological parameters.

Now the smart mobs are clustered within certain sub-networks. Being in different networks make people more distant. Several interesting observations can be made:

1. the law of homophily would predict the same thing, but its explanatory power seems to be limited. We are in the same network….what does that say about us being alike? I’d say not that much!
2. friends become more distant when they switch to different networks…but do acquitances become closer when they switch to the same network? This is still an open question.
3. From a technology adoption perspective, this illustrates the network effect of adoption. People think about their friends before deciding which network to join and the more your friends are with network A, the more like you will choose – and get stuck with network A. If I am one of the marketing people of those networks, I’d add some new customer referral bonu, too.

Hello world!

I started blogging a long, long time ago… And once upon a time, I wrote for two blogs simultaneously.

But, most of the blog entries I wrote are for personal, recreational, and other trivial purposes. I did thought about having a research blog, but was intimidated by the “seriousness” it sounds, and the time commitment it implies.

If blogs are virtual representaions of oneself, I was willingly getting my trivial and personal side up there. But, hey, research sounds like too much responsibility for a commitment phobic. One reason is that people connect one’s virtual ranting with one’s physical identity. Unfortunately, at the age of reputation, a dog can no longer hide at the other end of the net.  In other words, what I blog here about “research” may have real consequences and I am quite wary about it.

It was not until I went to the OII SDP2007, held at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, that I realized how not cool it is for researchers to not blog.  Almost every participants have a research blog and they even post live notes to their blogs, or personal research portals, during sessions. And, at the time when knowledge travels 10 million times faster than publication cycles, JZ said that it is important to get your stuff out there, time stamped.

There is even a student organized session on personal research portals, or research blogs. I missed some interesting discussion because I had to catch a flight. For me, some key questions remain: 1. what purposes does the blog serve? 2. how do we position blogging  in the myriad of research activities? Anyway,  let me experiment with this research blog and hopefully the answer will emerge sometime later.