Your Network at Play
October 10, 2015 12:19 PM Subscribe
The Washington Post has a puzzle to see how well you understand social networks. The day’s political issue: whether baseball caps are fashionable. More explanation and the solution below the jump.
Even with a minority opinion, caps are deemed fashionable. Despite the misleading title about understanding people, what the puzzle really demonstrates is graph theory and social network analysis (SNA). The WaPo example explicates an idea in the academic paper The Majority Illusion in Social Networks (full text PDF) by Lehrman, Yan and Wu. That paper finds that individuals can have a great deal of influence over their networks, even if they are indeed in the minority.
Social network visualization is easier than you may think. There are two major graph visualizers that are open source and have active communities: Gephi and the Excel based NodeXL (Win only). Getting started with Gephi. A video tutorial on NodeXL.
If you'd like to play with your own data, Netvizz on Facebook (you'll have to approve the app) will let you work with group and page data. Stanford offers a number of prerolled graph files, which will let you play around with real world data. And (thanks to their malfeasance) Enron's dataset provides a valuable contextualized social network of email exchanges. MIT provides an all-in-one analysis and visualization web tool if you'd like to look at your Gmail/Yahoo/Exchange data, with a handy option to delete the local copy after you exit.
Here are some key terms related to SNA: individuals are known as nodes, and a relationship between individuals (e.g. friendship) can be thought as an edge. Edges may have edge weight, meaning the strength of that relationship (e.g. amount of information shared, time spent together, etc.), as well as directionality, meaning the originator and the receiver of a friend request (e.g. you may follow Kanye West on Twitter, but he doesn't follow you). The number of edges that a node has is thought of as its degree, and the way that they are positioned in a graph is determined by some metric of centrality. Depending on the structure of the graph, further automated analysis can be done - and, in fact, Google's page rank is an example of graph analysis using linkages between websites that weights the quality of each connection by the reputation of its neighboring nodes. This article (HTML Fulltext) by Hawe, Webster and Shiell gives a more advanced glossary of terms.
Social network analysis comes in large part from Dr. Jacob Levy Moreno's early work in psychosociology, including a network analysis of runaways at a New York boarding school. A popular example of SNA is the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which has been automated at The Oracle of Bacon (challenge, try to get as far away from Kevin Bacon as possible - it's hard!). Other popular examples of SNA in action include figuring out what it means to like curly fries on Facebook (try out similar analysis on yourself here). Or unraveling a web of Californian political intrigue. And SNA methodologies applied to classical works of literature. Not to mention predicting political beliefs without reading a single line of text (previously and recently).
With a glut of information on social media platforms, machine automated SNA is driving what's displayed in your feed leading to a debate as to whether social media is creating more and more insular echo chamber effects. Or at the very least whether analyzing your friends can lead to accurate credit scores. Social theorist Zeynep Tufekci offers a critical perspective in this Medium article, Facebook and Engineering the Public (fulltext PDF of a much longer journal article on the subject):
Even with a minority opinion, caps are deemed fashionable. Despite the misleading title about understanding people, what the puzzle really demonstrates is graph theory and social network analysis (SNA). The WaPo example explicates an idea in the academic paper The Majority Illusion in Social Networks (full text PDF) by Lehrman, Yan and Wu. That paper finds that individuals can have a great deal of influence over their networks, even if they are indeed in the minority.
Social network visualization is easier than you may think. There are two major graph visualizers that are open source and have active communities: Gephi and the Excel based NodeXL (Win only). Getting started with Gephi. A video tutorial on NodeXL.
If you'd like to play with your own data, Netvizz on Facebook (you'll have to approve the app) will let you work with group and page data. Stanford offers a number of prerolled graph files, which will let you play around with real world data. And (thanks to their malfeasance) Enron's dataset provides a valuable contextualized social network of email exchanges. MIT provides an all-in-one analysis and visualization web tool if you'd like to look at your Gmail/Yahoo/Exchange data, with a handy option to delete the local copy after you exit.
Here are some key terms related to SNA: individuals are known as nodes, and a relationship between individuals (e.g. friendship) can be thought as an edge. Edges may have edge weight, meaning the strength of that relationship (e.g. amount of information shared, time spent together, etc.), as well as directionality, meaning the originator and the receiver of a friend request (e.g. you may follow Kanye West on Twitter, but he doesn't follow you). The number of edges that a node has is thought of as its degree, and the way that they are positioned in a graph is determined by some metric of centrality. Depending on the structure of the graph, further automated analysis can be done - and, in fact, Google's page rank is an example of graph analysis using linkages between websites that weights the quality of each connection by the reputation of its neighboring nodes. This article (HTML Fulltext) by Hawe, Webster and Shiell gives a more advanced glossary of terms.
Social network analysis comes in large part from Dr. Jacob Levy Moreno's early work in psychosociology, including a network analysis of runaways at a New York boarding school. A popular example of SNA is the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which has been automated at The Oracle of Bacon (challenge, try to get as far away from Kevin Bacon as possible - it's hard!). Other popular examples of SNA in action include figuring out what it means to like curly fries on Facebook (try out similar analysis on yourself here). Or unraveling a web of Californian political intrigue. And SNA methodologies applied to classical works of literature. Not to mention predicting political beliefs without reading a single line of text (previously and recently).
With a glut of information on social media platforms, machine automated SNA is driving what's displayed in your feed leading to a debate as to whether social media is creating more and more insular echo chamber effects. Or at the very least whether analyzing your friends can lead to accurate credit scores. Social theorist Zeynep Tufekci offers a critical perspective in this Medium article, Facebook and Engineering the Public (fulltext PDF of a much longer journal article on the subject):
... large corporations (and governments and political campaigns) now have new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams. These tools are new, this power is new and evolving. It’s exactly the time to speak up! That is one of the biggest shifts in power between people and big institutions, perhaps the biggest one yet of 21st century. This shift, in my view, is just as important as the fact that we, the people, can now speak to one another directly and horizontally.Relatedly, boyd and Crawford (abstract - fulltext PDF available in page) offer key issues in a social reality where big social data not only exists, but is the norm:
The current ecosystem around Big Data creates a new kind of digital divide: the Big Data rich and the Big Data poor ... Manovich writes
of three classes of people in the realm of Big Data: ‘those who create data (both consciously and by leaving digital footprints), those who have the means to collect it, and those who have expertise to analyze it’ (2011, PDF). We know that the last group is the smallest, and the most privileged: they are also the ones who get to determine the rules about how Big Data will be used, and who gets to participate.
Got it right the fist time by guessing which of the two options made less sense.
posted by Samizdata at 12:44 PM on October 10, 2015 [7 favorites]
posted by Samizdata at 12:44 PM on October 10, 2015 [7 favorites]
Yay, this is what I do at my day job! It's cool to see these sorts of things reach more mainstream attention. The amount of information you can derive from just publicly available relationship data (and explicitly shared - ie. follow and mention lists not tracker cookies), ignoring the content of the interactions, is quite remarkable.
posted by idiopath at 12:50 PM on October 10, 2015 [10 favorites]
posted by idiopath at 12:50 PM on October 10, 2015 [10 favorites]
Some quick thoughts:
- Rich people are more visible than working people. They have larger social networks, they are broadly speaking more popular (for obvious reasons), and their jobs (typically jobs coordinating subordinate workers rather than themselves directly producing anything) put them in positions where large numbers of people are forced to pay attention to them in order to make a living. Although there are few of them, they occupy the position that the baseball cap wearers occupy in the article's example.
- Advertising on the whole tends to reflect the views, desires, and interests of the people and organizations who pay for it. For obvious reasons, this means that advertising makes the very rich and their needs and their desires even more visible.
- This is why I am so fanatical about blocking ads wherever possible. However, the Lisa Simpson "Just don't look!" solution is facile and wrongheaded, since, well, they have ways of making us look. If we don't cater to the rich, we don't eat. If we don't pay attention to the rich, we lose track of what our culture is, because (like the baseball cap wearers) the few of them are better positioned to set cultural norms than the mass of us are.
- The rational play for an individual hoping to make themselves more influential (even if they hope to use that influence to better the world) is to pay close attention to the needs and desires of the people who already have a lot of attention paid to them, carefully flattering them so that they will share access to their network.
- This is why, for example, non-profits, even non-profits full of people devoted to reducing wealth inequality, must on a regular basis throw large private feasts and other similar ceremonies to honor the very, very rich.
- This is also why nominally Christian organizations like Young Life aim to recruit the very rich and very popular to their cause, flattering them to the exclusion of the less influential people with smaller networks, even though the core message of the Gospels is that the meek are more important than the powerful
- Under current social structures, helping the meek and ignoring the demands of the powerful is a quick, easy way to lose all influence, all resources, and all shelter.
- As a result of all this, all I can say (and it's hard to put together a rigorous political platform out of this) is that if we want to be free we must learn how to (in real, material terms) pay more attention to each other than to them. We must spend time looking at and talking with our peers rather than our leaders. We have to make a lot of friends, we have to make a lot of close friends, we have to make ourselves and our friends more visible to each other in order to counteract the built-in hypervisibility that the rich and connected have.
- And we must do this while very convincingly pretending to flatter the rich, because otherwise we'll get cut off by them before we manage to build economic and social structures that will allow us to thrive without them.
That was fun to figure out, and I got the answer right.
Now, reading all this other junk? Meh.
posted by carsonb at 12:55 PM on October 10, 2015
Now, reading all this other junk? Meh.
posted by carsonb at 12:55 PM on October 10, 2015
(Apologies, my meta-commentary on person-based data reliability is probably too obtuse as stated. Data is fun, people are terrible sources of data, we can still fool around with it all and learn something unexpected.)
posted by carsonb at 12:58 PM on October 10, 2015
posted by carsonb at 12:58 PM on October 10, 2015
Hm, this is fascinating, and argues for me bloviating about my views on Facebook even more thanI already do.
posted by Miko at 1:21 PM on October 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by Miko at 1:21 PM on October 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
I can't believe Nixon won! I don't know anyone who voted for him!
This, by the way, is why allies are so important in civil rights movements. Most people associate with a lot of people who are, at least demographically, a lot like them. And that can tend to create a lot of echo chambers. Being an ally means making a conscious effort to seek out information and opinions and friendships and experiences beyond that, and making a commitment to share what you've learned with others who haven't made that effort. So your racist uncle probably spends time with very few people of color. If his white friends and family members don't call him out on the racist things he says and talk with him about the lives of people beyond his small circle of friends and family, he can coast through life blissfully unaware of what the world looks and feels like to people who aren't like him, never having to confront the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that he and his friends do. Allies matter not just because they can help with the work of the movement, but because they can bring the ideas of the movement into places that (in large part because of the very bigotry and exclusion they're trying to fight) might never otherwise have to hear and consider them.
posted by decathecting at 1:29 PM on October 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
This, by the way, is why allies are so important in civil rights movements. Most people associate with a lot of people who are, at least demographically, a lot like them. And that can tend to create a lot of echo chambers. Being an ally means making a conscious effort to seek out information and opinions and friendships and experiences beyond that, and making a commitment to share what you've learned with others who haven't made that effort. So your racist uncle probably spends time with very few people of color. If his white friends and family members don't call him out on the racist things he says and talk with him about the lives of people beyond his small circle of friends and family, he can coast through life blissfully unaware of what the world looks and feels like to people who aren't like him, never having to confront the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that he and his friends do. Allies matter not just because they can help with the work of the movement, but because they can bring the ideas of the movement into places that (in large part because of the very bigotry and exclusion they're trying to fight) might never otherwise have to hear and consider them.
posted by decathecting at 1:29 PM on October 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
The answer seemed obvious to me; to borrow a term from Southpark, the blue dots are good "friend stock". But I can now understand why others might not pick the right answer.
I'm guess that if you chose the wrong answer then you might have also not realized the significance of how the poll question is worded. It wasn't "Are you voting for baseball caps?", which would have given an accurate result. Instead, it was "Do you think baseball caps will win?", which yes, will cause the question to over count vocal or popular supporters. Which is why polling is a hell of a lot tricker than you might suspect!
PS: baseball caps are not fashionable, unless you're trying to hide thinning hair (which is what I assume is usually going on).
posted by sbutler at 1:42 PM on October 10, 2015
I'm guess that if you chose the wrong answer then you might have also not realized the significance of how the poll question is worded. It wasn't "Are you voting for baseball caps?", which would have given an accurate result. Instead, it was "Do you think baseball caps will win?", which yes, will cause the question to over count vocal or popular supporters. Which is why polling is a hell of a lot tricker than you might suspect!
PS: baseball caps are not fashionable, unless you're trying to hide thinning hair (which is what I assume is usually going on).
posted by sbutler at 1:42 PM on October 10, 2015
Well, the Washington Post must like baseball caps... at least certain ones, because their blog "The Fix" recently put up a widget for you to fill in your own message on a "Trump Cap" (limit 14 characters on each of 2 lines, even shorter than Twitter).
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:46 PM on October 10, 2015
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:46 PM on October 10, 2015
It seems to me that this is why David Cameron directly attacked "Twitter" in his Tory conference speech. Modern electronic "social networks" are just as susceptible to these phenomena as any other, but they diminish the influence of centralised TV and print media as super-important nodes. What the effect of this (if any) will be, remains to be seen.
posted by howfar at 2:45 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by howfar at 2:45 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]
No one's said it yet? This is a terrific post.
posted by JHarris at 3:37 PM on October 10, 2015 [14 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 3:37 PM on October 10, 2015 [14 favorites]
Fashionable?
They're huge!
They're classy!
They are gonna Make America Great Again!
posted by nofundy at 4:07 PM on October 10, 2015
They're huge!
They're classy!
They are gonna Make America Great Again!
posted by nofundy at 4:07 PM on October 10, 2015
It is an awesome post. Good topic, interesting links, plenty of depth, very relevant to stuff I care about. Thanks!
posted by Miko at 4:28 PM on October 10, 2015
posted by Miko at 4:28 PM on October 10, 2015
It seems to me that this is why David Cameron directly attacked "Twitter" in his Tory conference speech. Modern electronic "social networks" are just as susceptible to these phenomena as any other, but they diminish the influence of centralised TV and print media as super-important nodes. What the effect of this (if any) will be, remains to be seen.
In certain ways they're actually more susceptible to this effect than traditional mass media are, because they're systems wherein the chief thing that determines whether or not a given Twitter handle (or whatever) will get more followers is whether or not they already have a bunch of followers. This is why if you graph Twitter users by number of followers, you find that it falls into a power-law distribution; if you have a lot of followers, you're seen by a lot of people, which tends to net you more followers, which tends to get you seen by even more people, and so on and so on.
This feedback loop couldn't arise quite so smoothly in the context of the old mass media, wherin there were only a few outlets and where the chief determinant of whether or not you got seen was less about whether or not people were already watching you, and more about whether or not you either owned a broadcast outlet or had won the favor of a broadcast outlet owner.
You'll find in the "see also" for that wikipedia page a link to the page for wealth concentration; this is there because the distribution of wealth in market systems, just like the distribution of Twitter followers by user, tends to follow a power law. This is because wealth in market systems tends to work much like followers on Twitter do; the main tool you need to get more wealth in a market is whether you already have access to wealth, and so those who are already rich tend to, all else being equal, see continually increasing cascades of money flow toward them.
Social media and market economies both stand as excellent examples of how free choice among all participants can result in radically unequal distributions, and in turn in a radical lack of genuine freedom for most participants.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:28 PM on October 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
In certain ways they're actually more susceptible to this effect than traditional mass media are, because they're systems wherein the chief thing that determines whether or not a given Twitter handle (or whatever) will get more followers is whether or not they already have a bunch of followers. This is why if you graph Twitter users by number of followers, you find that it falls into a power-law distribution; if you have a lot of followers, you're seen by a lot of people, which tends to net you more followers, which tends to get you seen by even more people, and so on and so on.
This feedback loop couldn't arise quite so smoothly in the context of the old mass media, wherin there were only a few outlets and where the chief determinant of whether or not you got seen was less about whether or not people were already watching you, and more about whether or not you either owned a broadcast outlet or had won the favor of a broadcast outlet owner.
You'll find in the "see also" for that wikipedia page a link to the page for wealth concentration; this is there because the distribution of wealth in market systems, just like the distribution of Twitter followers by user, tends to follow a power law. This is because wealth in market systems tends to work much like followers on Twitter do; the main tool you need to get more wealth in a market is whether you already have access to wealth, and so those who are already rich tend to, all else being equal, see continually increasing cascades of money flow toward them.
Social media and market economies both stand as excellent examples of how free choice among all participants can result in radically unequal distributions, and in turn in a radical lack of genuine freedom for most participants.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:28 PM on October 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
This really is a top rate post. Thanks for putting the time into it. I'll be curled up reading for the rest of the day getting smarter by the hour.
posted by salishsea at 5:35 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by salishsea at 5:35 PM on October 10, 2015 [2 favorites]
But unlike capitalism YCTAB Twitter is a meritocracy (or at least a popularity contest). Yes, celebrities start with a leg up, but there are plenty of networks of the marginalized that rival (or dwarf) those of the rich and fabulous. BlackLivesMatter has influencers too, and until they get co-opted into doing Monster energy spons exclusively, they have the opportunity to be a positive influence on a lot of people.
One this this article does not note is that if most people think baseball hats are going to win, they will remember that they actually always have liked and supported baseball hats.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:13 PM on October 10, 2015
One this this article does not note is that if most people think baseball hats are going to win, they will remember that they actually always have liked and supported baseball hats.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:13 PM on October 10, 2015
But unlike capitalism YCTAB Twitter is a meritocracy (or at least a popularity contest). Yes, celebrities start with a leg up, but there are plenty of networks of the marginalized that rival (or dwarf) those of the rich and fabulous. BlackLivesMatter has influencers too, and until they get co-opted into doing Monster energy spons exclusively, they have the opportunity to be a positive influence on a lot of people.
Ugh, I had a whole thing typed out and then my phone ate it. Grar!
Anyway: I hesitate to use the word "meritocratic" to describe networks that contain feedback loops wherein the chief way to get more of a resource is to already have a lot of that resource. I recall a little while ago seeing an article by metafilter's favorite white backgrounds fetishist about how he's got nearly as many Twitter followers as Björk, not because his tweets have any particular merit, but solely because he knew an early Twitter employee and because of this was on Twitter's old "suggested users" list for a little while. He still gets vastly more new followers every day than most people of his stature, again not because of merit, but because of that small and basically meaningless initial bump. Although social media networks have picked a slightly different set of winners than the broader capitalist economy in which they're embedded has, they're still on the whole devices for picking more or less arbitrary winners and then making sure they keep winning harder and harder.
(Also, social networks that sort by a "top stories" algorithm rather than simply showing the most recent posts display a stronger tendency to squeeze out people who aren't already connected, through burying their content. They don't always do this, and at times new people can break through, but nevertheless there is that extra tendency toward rewarding the already rewarded. Sometimes I joke that the battle for the future will be fought between "top stories" and "most recent." And sometimes I'm not joking).
But nevertheless, yes, right now some social media networks are better at surfacing opportunities for ordinary people to recognize and coordinate with each other than mass media networks were.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:33 AM on October 11, 2015 [4 favorites]
Ugh, I had a whole thing typed out and then my phone ate it. Grar!
Anyway: I hesitate to use the word "meritocratic" to describe networks that contain feedback loops wherein the chief way to get more of a resource is to already have a lot of that resource. I recall a little while ago seeing an article by metafilter's favorite white backgrounds fetishist about how he's got nearly as many Twitter followers as Björk, not because his tweets have any particular merit, but solely because he knew an early Twitter employee and because of this was on Twitter's old "suggested users" list for a little while. He still gets vastly more new followers every day than most people of his stature, again not because of merit, but because of that small and basically meaningless initial bump. Although social media networks have picked a slightly different set of winners than the broader capitalist economy in which they're embedded has, they're still on the whole devices for picking more or less arbitrary winners and then making sure they keep winning harder and harder.
(Also, social networks that sort by a "top stories" algorithm rather than simply showing the most recent posts display a stronger tendency to squeeze out people who aren't already connected, through burying their content. They don't always do this, and at times new people can break through, but nevertheless there is that extra tendency toward rewarding the already rewarded. Sometimes I joke that the battle for the future will be fought between "top stories" and "most recent." And sometimes I'm not joking).
But nevertheless, yes, right now some social media networks are better at surfacing opportunities for ordinary people to recognize and coordinate with each other than mass media networks were.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:33 AM on October 11, 2015 [4 favorites]
If we don't cater to the rich, we don't eat.There is an alternative theory.
posted by fullerine at 3:15 AM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]
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