Structure and Evolution

Binxing Fang, Yan Jia, Binxing Fang, Yan Jia

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110598070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

The three volume set provides a systematic overview of theories and technique on social network analysis. Volume 1 of the set mainly focuses on the structure characteristics, the modeling, and the evolution mechanism of social network analysis. Techniques and approaches for virtual community detection are discussed in detail as well. It is an essential reference for scientist and professionals in computer science.

1 Introduction

Binxing Fang

1.1 Social network and its development

1.1.1 The origin of social network

Since the beginning of mankind, people have been working together, farming and hunting, and forming a society. With the development of society and deepening of communication, various relationships are established between people. Social relationships are developed including friendships, production relationships, labor relationships, and social interactions in addition to consanguinity and familial relationships. As social members interact with other during work, study, life, entertainment, and other activities, stable relationships are gradually formed, resulting in the generation of a social network. Like Mickenberg and Dugan said in 1995, “we all connect, like a net we cannot see” [1].

In Wikipedia, social network is defined as: “a social structure made up of a set of nodes. The nodes generally refer to individuals or organizations, and the social network stands for various social relationships. In the social network, relatively stable relationship systems are formed between members due to interactions, and the relationship systems may include friendships, classmate relationships, business partnerships, or race and faith relationships. By means of these relationships, the social network ties different people closely, from those meet each other occasionally to intimate family members and then to those in various social activities” [2]. Because there are various social relationships in the social network, the social graphical structure of social organizations or individuals tends to be very complex [2]. The complex relational structure affects interactions and associations between members, affecting people’s social behaviors.

From a historical perspective, social network is the backbone for integrating people and the internet. As a result of industrialization and urbanization as well as the rise of new communication technologies, society tends to be networked more and more closely. In 2012, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman listed the social network revolution, mobile revolution, and internet revolution as the three major movements affecting human society in this era in their new book “Networked: The New Social Operating System” [3]. At present, the internet, as an interactive platform playing an important role in mutual communication, interaction, and participation, has been developed significantly beyond ARPANET’s original military and technical purposes. Moreover, the social network covers almost all forms of network services centered on human society, allowing the internet to be developed from an application platform for research departments, schools, and governments/businesses into a tool for people to establish and develop relationships as well as to communicate with each other.

1.1.2 A Glimpse of the development procedure of social networks from the perspective of sociology

In 1842, French sociologist and positivism philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) proposed a term [4] “sociology,” defining two primary aspects of researches in sociology, i.e., social statics and social dynamics. He was the first person to propose studies on the society considering mutual relationships between social actors. Auguste Comte considered that individuals are basic elements constituting the society, while individual properties in turn exert influence on society’s properties. His contributions propelled the development of sociology as a branch of science.

French sociologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) claimed that the relationships [5] among social members should be observed from a group perspective, focussing on the circulation of information among group members. He pointed out that, when an individual becomes a member of a group, they lose their identity as an individual. As a member of the group, people imitate others around them. As the group’s ideas and behaviors get widely spread, individuals’ ideas and behaviors are deeply influenced.

From the perspective of sociology, social network originates from “Sociology” theory [6] proposed by the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918). In the 1960s, with the beginning of the Cold War and social chaos pervasive in the western world, Georg Simmel’s “Sociology” theory developed rapidly in the west and became mature in the 1970s. With the development process lasting for half a century, “Social Structure” theory [7] in sociology has been widely applied in different fields including psychology, sociometric, sociology, anthropology, mathematics, statistics, and probabilism, gradually collaborating into a set of systematic theories, methods, and technology and becoming an important social structure study paradigm.

The popularity of the social networks concept originates from his description of interaction of social relationships. Over the past century, sociologists have used the metaphor of social networks to indicate various complicated social relationships. However, by the 1950, the vocabulary began to be systematically used to indicate social communities with boundaries, which are different than the traditional sense (such as villages and families), and a social category where people were regarded as separate individuals (such as gender and race). For example, considering people in a café, colleagues working together, or people communicating with each other on the internet as social communities having a boundary can lead to an erroneous belief that they have a sense of belonging to their common group because they know each other. The truth is that people keep entering or exiting from a social network, and the social network becomes a complicated structure.

In 1988, a well-known Canadian sociologist Barry Wellman proposed a relatively mature definition of social networks. He considered that the social network is a relatively stable system [8] comprising social relationships among certain individuals; that is, “network” can be regarded as a series of social connections or social relationships linking the actors, with the relatively stable relationship mode constituting the social structure. With continual expansion of the scope of application, the concept of social networks has gone beyond personal relationships; network actors may be individuals or aggregation units such as families, departments, and organizations.

The social network in its early stage mainly refers to offline social networks established among individuals through acquaintanceship or working relationships such as scientific research cooperation relationship networks and actor cooperation networks. Among these, the social relationship network of 34 members in a karate club of a university constructed by sociologist Wayne Zachary in the 1970s is a typical representation [9] of early social networks.

With the development of internet, the regional element reflected by the network structure weakened. Consequently, regional limitation in traditional offline social networks has increasingly weakened, and cross-regional online social relationships have become an important pattern of social networks. After 2003, with the emergence of Web 2.0 technology, online social network media has attracted more and more attention from people who started to create accounts on online social media platforms, typically represented by Facebook, Twitter, Blog, and other social networking sites, and add friends who they get acquainted with offline. Since then, offline social networking has expanded to network environments becoming an indispensable communication tool for people in their network life.

1.1.3 A glimpse of the development of social network from the perspective of anthropology

From the perspective of anthropology, early studies on social network mainly included two modes: nonindustrial society and industrial society.

The study on kinship by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), an American anthropologist, was the most representative of social networks in a nonindustrial society [10]. While studying the Iroquois tribes, he found that the terms of kinship terms in Iroquois were completely different from those in modern America, while the terms of kinship in other Indians was basically the same as that in Iroquois. He published a book “Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family” in 1871, pointing out that kinship terms were not general, and different cultures had different systems. He solved the relation problem between the culture and terms of kinship.

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), an English anthropologist, inherited and developed the theory of Lewis Henry Morgan. He pointed out that the kinship system was a network of social relations composed of the network of all the social relations. Such a network of all social relations was termed the social structure. He advocated that a social network analysis method was used for analyzing the kinship relation to gradually form the structural functionalism theory [11], making social network a dominant concept in English anthropology.

However, the traditional kinship studies has two limitations: first, they only focus on individual members in the kinship relation and ignore the mutual relation among members; second, they focus on the source and historical development of the kinship and ignore the horizontal structure study. Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), a French anthropologist, proposed a method of studying the kinship relation from a structural viewpoint [12], and summarized a binary opposition relation consisting of eight members in four groups of key relatives: husband and wife, brother and sister, father and son, and uncle and nephew. His method outlined a deep and general social network structure behind the kinship relation.

In addition to the study on the kinship relation, with colonialism collapsing and primitive society drifting away, the focus of anthropological studies shifted to wide agricultural society and social society. The study on the social relation also extended from the kinship relation to different social relations in urban cities, enterprises, and organizations. In 1929, William Lloyd Worner (1847–1928), an American anthropologist, organized the “Yankee City” project [13] to apply his method of studying Australian indigenous people to the study on American towns. He proposed a method of emphasizing social class, individual interaction, and social network. His research had a profound impact on later researchers.

Second, in the industrial society mode, the study of Max Gluckman (1911–1975), an important British anthropologist, was the most representative [14]. He observed five factories. On one hand, he continued Radcliffe-Brown’s emphasis on the social structure. On the other hand, he started to focus on the wider social context where the workshop was in, treating it as the key component of the study. He found that informal organizations existed in five factories. Although the relation mode between workers and managers was different, a social relation for spontaneous cooperation did not exist; instead, numerous conflicts existed between workers and managers.

In addition to being applied to the study on the modern industrial society, the social network was applied to the study on urbanization of third-world countries. Bruce Kapferer (1940–Present), an Australian anthropologist, studied the labor conflict in a mining company [15]. Beside considering factors such as the interaction relation among workers, and the social network consisting of workers in his study, he analyzed the relation among the interaction of workers, the social network of workers, and key factory events such as strike action.

1.2 Development of online social networks

1.2.1 Concept of online social networks

With the rapid development of the Internet technology, people introduce the concept of early social networking into the Internet, and create the online social networks for social networking services (SNS). The meaning of online social networks includes hardware, software, service, and application. Because a word group consisting of four words meets Chinese’s word-formation habit, people customarily use the social network to replace the SNS.

The online social networks can be divided into four categories according to the research report [16] on social computing of European Union:

1. Instant messaging applications, which are platforms for providing online real-time communication, such as MSN, QQ, AIM, Fetion and WeChat, and have mutual authentication and real-time push characteristics;
2. Online social applications, which are platforms for providing online social relationships, such as Facebook, Google+ (Google), RENN, Kaixin001 and Qzone, and have mutual authentication and non-realtime access characteristics;
3. Microblog-type applications, which are platforms for bi-directionally releasing short messages, such as Twitter, Sina weibo, Tencent weibo, and NetEase weibo and Sohu weibo, and have one-way authentication and realtime push characteristics;
4. Space-sharing type applications, which are Web 2.0 applications which can communicate with each other but are not tightly combined, such as forums, blogs, BBS, video sharing, social bookmark and online shopping, and have one-way authentication and non-realtime access characteristics.

The online social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors and a set of ties between these actors...