Misunderstanding Social Networks
Monday 18 August 2008 ◷ 03:09
Spending some time using social networking sites like LinkedIn, Xing and Hyves I noticed some users trying to get to the core of a network. Like there is some hierarchy involved and social networking is about getting to the one person at the top, or becoming the one person at the top. But there is no hierarchy and there is no top (and no visualization tool in LinkedIn that shows that). It's easy to mistake LinkedIn's 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade connections for a layered organization with you on top, but you are the only one seeing it that way. Influence doesn't flow that way either, there is not one source that provides knowledge and trends to other nodes and thus there is no point in being close to the source to have an advantage. The social network is like a traffic flow in which you can't understand the congestion of the flow by just looking at the individual vehicles, especially if you're one of the vehicles yourself. You can't find the cause of a traffic jam by asking all individual drivers involved if they caused the jam, because it takes complex interaction between a group of several drivers to cause it. In the same way there is no single node in a social network that causes waves of influence in the network. It will be a group of nodes, or the network as a whole that generates waves of influences. Social networking isn't about cutting out the middleman to get closer to a source, the middleman is part of the source.