Howard Rheingold was one of the first people who articulated the promise of the social web. With “Homesteading on the Virtual Frontier” he literally wrote the book on online community. Rheingold is an unapologetic enthusiast for the potential of digital community and the network society but he is also thoughtful and balanced in his examination of how we are now using social media. In the same way as...
This weekend you’ll be pleased to know I have been reading the recently released update of the OXIS survey (which you can get hold of here - but large thanks to Tim Davies for posting me a copy!). I have also been updating my Facts Glorious Facts page if you like that kind of thing so this post is really just a few highlights and observations from the report.
For those of you who haven’t come across it the...
How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
This is brief write up of the Robin Dunbar book “How many friends does one person need?”. I read the book as a balance to the way in which its very easy to start thinking of networks mathematically and systemically even though its incredibly important to remember the fact that social networks are made up of people and...
This post is a bit of a hodgepodge of follow up from stuff I was working on last week – we’ll see if it weaves itself into one piece by the end.
First up is a follow up on the social network analysis. Ethnobot was good enough to point me at the work of Damon Centola and his content on weak ties. Centola talks about weak ties in more detail and looks at how they work in order to pass ideas and information....
I can very easily be accused of over using a few key quotes in my presentations – the main one being this from Manuel Castells:
“ Until we rebuild, both from the bottom up and from the top down, our institutes of governance and democracy, we will not be able to stand up to the fundamental challenges that we are facing”
This means that when I was recently asked – “who else talks about the network...
