From: James Whyte <whyte.james@yahoo.com>
John Veitch <jsveitch@ate.co.nz> wrote:The questions Tom Shelly asks are far too difficult to understand. Online Social Networks are too new, and too fragile and too different for research into the questions asked to be possible. There are just too many variables.
Folks could take a peek at http://www.blogninja.com/vsw-draft-paolillo-wright-foaf.pdf for one method of dealing with variance and the polysemous nature of online social networks. We were able to extract and label 20+ kinds of interpretable relatedness/difference for LiveJournal accounts; I posit that one could take this kind of quantitatively-driven extraction approach with other sites, as well. LiveJournal just happens to have particularly clearly specified data about every user...... and it kind of helps to have quant methods feed qualitative interp. ;)
As I interpret the research, I have come to the conclusion that the bulk of social networks are reflective of the offline origins.
Yes, I think you're right in generalizing. Clearly there will be *some* differences due to the change in the nature of the medium, but clearly *much* of the way in which things work is related to the capacities and needs of the human social animal.
Newness is not indicative of difference. If one accepts general process it leads to the lawfullness of human behavior whether online or offline.
I don't understand the last sentence of this. Particularly the use of the word lawfulness. --e