human-networks | Danny Zuckerman

Science of networks and how they work, done in an accessible way

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Highlights

it was a network of humans spreading news and outrage. What was new was how widely and quickly news could spread, and how people were able to coordinate their responses. But understanding what happened still boils down to understanding how news spreads between people and how their behaviors influence each other. — location: 65 ^ref-8084

networks enhance our understanding of many of our social and economic behaviors. — location: 83 ^ref-13370

discussion will also involve two different perspectives: one is how networks form and why they exhibit certain key patterns, and the other is how those patterns determine our power, opinions, opportunities, behaviors, and accomplishments. — location: 86 ^ref-1264

A person can be a bridge or intermediary between people who don’t know each other directly—enabling that person to broker favors and consolidate power by being uniquely positioned to coordinate the actions of others. — location: 189 ^ref-13371

Popular people disproportionately set perceptions and determine norms of behavior. — location: 232 ^ref-28652

behaviors driven disproportionately by those who socialize the most, and the resulting norms are more extreme than if our perceptions were not network-based. — location: 302 ^ref-26761

a study of Twitter behavior15 found that more than 98 percent of users had fewer followers than the people whom they followed: — location: 304 ^ref-62521

there was no relationship between the initial seeds’ degrees and the spread of microfinance in — location: 518 ^ref-11718

Also, some topics — location: 545 ^ref-12135

we have seen three distinct conceptual approaches to measuring a person’s position in a network; with degree centrality identifying direct influence, eigenvector centrality capturing the power of one’s friends, and diffusion centrality tracking the reach that someone has at spreading (or receiving) information with some limited time and interest. — location: 557 ^ref-20294

Centrality begets centrality. If people gain friends in proportion to how many friends they already have, — location: 673 ^ref-16507

“preferential attachment”—forming new relationships in proportion to how many connections a node already has. — location: 676 ^ref-46523

the greater the role that the network itself plays in the formation of new relationships, the greater the compounding effect and the resulting inequality in connectedness across nodes. When people find each other via existing relationships, then there can be an enormous multiplier effect. — location: 695 ^ref-7236

This can be especially important in business settings—where being well-positioned makes one more attractive to attach to and easier to find. This makes it easier to gain important contacts and snowballs. — location: 698 ^ref-47258

Reach—“Diffusion Centrality”: How well positioned is a person to spread information and to be one of the first to hear it? Can a given individual reach many others within a short number of hops in the network? — location: 715 ^ref-2526

A critical number associated with a disease and a network through which it might spread is known as the disease’s “basic reproduction number.” This tracks how many other people are newly infected by a typical infected individual. If its basic reproduction number is above one, then a disease spreads, while if it is below one, then the disease dies out. — location: 808 ^ref-5189

Globalization leads not only to more interconnections, but also to more diversified investments and safer portfolios overall.1 New contacts in a disease network help it spread faster and more widely, while in a financial network new contacts — location: 1164 ^ref-22351

“The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged…and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.” —ALAN GREENSPAN — location: 1366 ^ref-54841