last week

Key points (so far)

1. When technologies connect or separate people, they become media
2. Technologies embody
3. When a medium is new, it is often used to simulate old media
4. New media do not replace old media, they displace them
5. People make media and then media make people.

Today's Keypoint

- New media technologies usually reinforce existing social networks or even work to isolate people
- (BUT) When new media techologies facilitate new social networks, They simultaneously challenge existing social, political and economic relationship

Social networks as science : field

-Social network analysis is an interdisciplinary social science, but has been of especial concern to sociologists;
-recently, physicists and mathematicians have made large contributions to understanding networks in general (as graphs) and thus contributed to and understanding of social networks too.

Social network as science: definition

-[Social network analysis]is grounded in the observation that social actors [i.e., people] are interdependent and that the links [i.e., relationships] among them have important consequences for every individual [and for all of the individuals together]..... [Relationships]provide individuals with opportunities and, at the same time, potential constraints on their behavior.... social network analysis involves theorizing, model building and empirical research focused on uncovering the patterning of links among actor. It is concerned also with uncovering the antecedents and consequences of recurrent patterns.

Social network as science: history

Social network as science: equivalence

Social networks as science: bridges
-if you connect seperate networks you have bridging capital
-if you are cetral to a network you have bonding capital

Social networks as science: bowling alone

-Sociologist robert putnam claims that united states citizens no longer know or trust their neighbors and thus communities have lost their social capital
-When did we start to lose it? after the second world war
-What media technology came into wide-spread use after the second world war?

Social networks as technology
-email, newsgroups, and weblogs
in the design of the arpanet (the foreruner to the internet) email was an afterthought



I have learned social networks for this week. It is progress according to datas of photos , so I understanded better by virtue of photo datas