Summary of mandatory literature of the course Internet, Social Media & Networks from Utrecht University. I structured the articles based on the different kinds of reading questions we had to answer for the seminars (research question, theories, hypotheses, methodology, results, critique, policy rec...
Internet, Social Media & Networks
Summary mandatory literature and seminars
Corten, R. (2012). Composition and structure of a large online social
network in the Netherlands. PLOS One, 7(4), e34760.
1. What is the research question?
- What is the composition of the Hyves network in terms of the demographic
characteristics of its members?
- What characterizes the structure of this network?
- How does the Hyves network compare to other online friendship networks in
terms of structure?
2. What are the main concepts?
- Small-world problem: the observation that although social networks are
typically very clustered, they also have a short characteristic path length, such
that many nodes in the network can be reached in surprisingly few steps
- Degree distributions: the statistical distributions of the number of nodes’
connections. Many large networks are characterized by ‘scale-free’ or ‘power
law’ degree distributions (degree distributions in which the ratio of high-
degree nodes and low-degree nodes in constant over the range of degrees;
typical is a ‘fat tail’, the occurrence of nodes with extremely high degrees is
relatively likely)
- Multi-scaling behavior: the presence of different types of nodes, suggesting
that online networks that consist of social interaction may behave in ways that
significantly differ from other large systems
- Giant component: a connected subset of the network that contains the large
majority or even all of the nodes.
- Homophilious social networks: nodes with similar characteristics are more
likely to be connected than dissimilar nodes
→ degree assortativity: the tendency of high-degree nodes to be
connected to other high-degree nodes and of low-degree nodes to
be connected to other low-degree nodes, which creates a core-
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, periphery structure
3. What theories were used? What are the mechanisms?
Online social networks are web-based services that allow individuals to
- Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system
- Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
- View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within
the system
The availability of online social network data holds the promise of a way out for some
common methodological problems in traditional research. Such research falls
generally in one of two categories:
1. Dataset of ‘ego-networks’: a sample of individuals is surveyed about their
personal social networks
a. One can study personal social networks in relatively large populations
b. One cannot study network structure beyond these personal networks
2. ‘Sociometric approach’: researcher defines a group within substantive bounds
(such as a community) and surveys the members about all their contacts
within this group
a. One can study structural questions
b. One cannot generalize the outcome of the research to larger
populations, because the approach is limited
Online social network data have the potential to ease these limitations by combining
the two approaches. It can be collected on very large groups. One can collect
information on all relations within the given populations, which allows to study social
structure. Thirdly, they provide actual measures of behavior as opposed to answers
to survey questions, thereby evaluating shortcomings of ordinary survey-based
research.
However, research on online networks has only rarely fulfilled these promises.
4. What were the main hypotheses?
No hypotheses used.
5. What are the methods the researchers used?
The dataset used in this study consists of an anonymized snapshot of the entire
network provided by Hyves.nl in July 2010 for the purpose of this study. I assess the
structure of the network in terms of fundamental properties like the degree
distribution, clustering, characteristic path length, and degree assortativity.
6. What is the scientific contribution?
The contribution of this paper to the literature is twofold. First, this study is, to my
knowledge, the largest study of an online social friendship network in which the
population of the online social network coincides to a large extent with the population
of a well-defined society (i.e., the Netherlands), which allows me to explore the extent
to which the online social network can be interpreted as a measure of the friendship
network within this society. Earlier studies have either focused on online social
networks that span multiple societies or on online social networks that cover a much
smaller portion of the population. The second contribution of the paper is to make an
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