Critical phenomena in complex contagions

Occupied with Place: Exploring Twitter Resistance Networks

“…SNA models are used to describe how social distance between actors is related to the degree to which those actors exhibit similar behavior (Christakis and Fowler, 2011), how relationship types shared by actors influence the exchange of novel information (Granovetter, 1973) and how connection characteristics relate to influencing behavior (Barash et al, 2012;Brown and Reingen, 1987;González-Bailón et al, 2011). Thus, SNA's focus on the relationships that constitute a network is well suited to analyzing the self-representation of place as a constitutive component of these networks.…”

Error correction mechanisms in social networks can reduce accuracy and encourage innovation

“…One stream of research has shown how weak (Granovetter, 1973(Granovetter, , 1995, bridging (Burt, 1992), and high bandwidth (Aral and Van Alstyne, 2011) ties can accelerate the diffusion of social contagions. Other research (Centola and Macy, 2007) has complicated this picture by suggesting that the "complexity" of the contagion can impact diffusion, at least initially (Barash et al, 2012), and favor strong ties over weak ties. Research has also striven to identify the individuals in networks who are most susceptible to contagions (Aral and Walker, 2012), as well as to distinguish tendencies to adopt the behaviors of our associates from tendencies to associate with those to whom we are similar (Aral et al, 2009;Lewis et al, 2012).…”

“…As a result, the underlying variation in actions and understandings (e.g., how music is understood or consumed) is undetectable. Finally, theoretical work on contagions (e.g., Barash et al, 2012;Centola and Macy, 2007;Rodriguez et al, 2014) has often employed simulation models that implicitly (or explicitly; see Carley, 1991, p. 334) assume that information is passed from node to node without error. The impact of errors is thus excluded a priori and with minimal, if any, theoretical justification.…”

Examining the Role of "Place" in Twitter Networks through the Lens of Contentious Politics

“…SNA models can help us understand how social distance between actors is related to the degree to which those actors exhibit similar behavior [10], how contextual environment such as geographic propinquity and being in the same organization support the formation of homophilous relations [44], and how the type of the relationship that actors share influences how likely they are to share novel information [23] as well as how the type of connection is related to influencing behavior [3,5,20].…”