How to Study Online Networking: The Role of Social Network Analysis

Introduction

One of the far-reaching explanatory schemes in contemporary sociology focuses on the concept of social structure that refers to patterning in social relations. Sociologically, the concept of structure may be used either to refer on the larger scale to the actors (group) of reciprocally defined social categories that are seen to comprise some social whole, or it can be used to refer to smaller scale social structures as configurations of concrete relationships among actors (individuals) without reference to a level of a larger societal totality. Most important for the science of social structure was what Simmel explained in «The Intersection of Social Circles» (1955): An actor may stand simultaneously in multiple social groups that overlap with each other at the site of that actor. Society is a “web of relationships” that is not organized into a unified and harmonious set of structures but into multiple overlapping, often uncoordinated, and sometimes conflicting, ones (Simmel, 1992). With the exponential rise in popularity of online social networks (OSNs) in recent years, there have been a number of scholars who study and measure the topological properties of such networks. It is not surprising that the need of characterization or comprehension of interconnectedness between social reality and world-wide web has been a central issue for sociologists. Social media and social networks are pervasive in the daily use as well as in a number of applications. Social media and social networks are also intertwined, as the social medial platforms also offer the opportunity to develop and analyze social networks. Due to this interconnections there has been an explosion of new interest in social network research through the approach of Social network analysis (SNA). Social network research is back “warm” today, with the number of articles on the topic of on line social networks nearly tripling in the past decade. For sociologists, this interweaving has been a further breakthrough within field research yielding explanations for social phenomena in a wide variety of new ways. Social network analysis has been recognized both as a powerful paradigm and as a technical tool for representing social network structures and information dissemination on the web.

Traditionally, studies on “real” social networks have shown interesting properties such as “small world” or “six degrees” of separation effect (Milgram, 1967) or “scale-free effect” as well (Castells, 2004). A network is a structure of social actors who interact, collaborate, influence, and networks help to form a basis for shared norms, identity, and collective behavior and are present in different forms within off and online worlds. This perspective is well exemplified by the Stanley Milgram theory about the six degrees of separation effect (ib., 1967; Travers & Milgram, 1969). This theory analyses the probability that two randomly selected individuals would know one another by having participants forward a mailed letter intended for a target person. Of those letters that reached the target, the average number of exchanges was six. The experiment was interpreted as showing that all people are connected to one another by an average of six degrees of separation. This small-world concept has also been demonstrated in a replication of Stanley Milgram’s original study via an email-based social research study to examine chains in forwarded email messages attempting to reach 18 target individuals across 13 different countries (Portnova, Frazer-Lock, Ladd, & Zimmerman, 2007). Moreover, scientists have demonstrated similar patterns on online social networks for small world phenomenon (Leskovec, 2008) or for scale-free effect (Bichler, 2008).