“Attention Networks vs. Social Networks”

Article link: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/11/29/attention_netwo.html

This article discusses the difference between how attention networks and social networks model relationships.  The author believes that social networks are not an ideal model because they do not provide adequate information about relationships because of its undirected nature.  For examples, they don’t measure how long you’ve been friends, how strong the connection is, etc.  However, attention networks show what people are the focus of other people’s attention, and do not require reciprocity.  These relationships often go one way as in a directed graph; for instance, Joe Shmoe may read a lot of articles about Britney Spears, but Britney doesn’t know who Joe is.  Because many real-life relationships are unequal, attention networks better illustrate different hierarchies and power structures.

This article relates to the class discussion of the definition of nodes and edges in social networks.  Using the social networking model of relationships, edges are very simple (you’re either a friend or you’re not), but you don’t know exactly what kind of relationship it is.  However, in the attention network, you can see more clearly the power structures within relationships, and thus, see who is popular or a celebrity, who has the possibility to be a “connector”, and who has an important role in a network.  Currently, Facebook attempts to create more realistic relationships to one’s “friends” by adding details about how one knows everyone in his/her network.  This option allows one to put the people in his/her network into different categories/levels of “friends”.  While this adds more information about the relationship, Facebook still requires reciprocation of the details of the relationship, making the edges of the network still undirected.  While this may still be unrealistic compared to real-life relationships, it does avoid major problems with privacy, stalking, awkward situations, and is a step in the right direction. 

In the future, social networking sites may move toward being closer to attention networks.  As social networks get larger (since there can only be one main giant connected group of nodes in a large network), there becomes a more pressing need to categorize friends and differentiate the close friends from the casual acquaintances.  By grouping people into different levels of friendship, it will allow people to focus more on who they want rather than everybody at once.  I think that eventually, social networks will become less of an entertainment/procrastination tool and more of an informational tool.  If they could be connected to other systems (i.e. email, phones, IM, recommendation and review services, etc), attention networks could be used to tailor the order of phone lists, email messages, consumer opinions, etc. to put the people who you focus the most attention on at the top of your list – to give you the most relevant and trustworthy information.