[Asis-l] Online Social Networks As Crystals?

[Murray Turoff]

i seem to recall a study that by making assumptions on the stress and
strain relationships between wood cells one could use fractals to
actually illustrate or generate many of the different branching
structures that exist among different types of trees to get the
overall shape and relationships of the whole tree.

It would seem to me that Fractals might be an approach to get a
richness of structures that might be better related to social
structures.  I certianly agree with Seth that crystal structures are
too limited.

On Feb 3, 2008 1:34 PM, Seth Grimes <grimes at altaplana.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Gerry Mckiernan wrote:
>
> > It has occurred to me that Online Social Networking [
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_service ] may be envisioned
> > as Crystals [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystals ]
> >
> > Your Thoughts || Reactions / Related Research || Projects ?
> >
> > Are We In An Era of Social Crystallization?
>
> No, doesn't work.  Crystals are regular, stable lattices in
> three-dimensional space of interconnected atoms or molecules of
> homogeneous type.  While crystals may contact faults and impurities, what
> makes them crystals is that they are *regular*, *stable*, and *in 3D
> space*.
>
> Social networks are irregular, dynamic, heterogeneous in both node and
> connection types.  Many social networks are only partly discovered in the
> sense that many of the nodes and connections of real-world networks are
> hidden.  For example, what are the "Six Degrees of Separation" between me
> (Seth) and you (Gerry)?  I don't have a clue, but it's a good bet that
> either you and I know some person in common or that you and I each have
> acquaintances who know each other.  I can say this with some certainty
> without know who the links in our chain are or what's that foundation for
> the links, e.g., professional, personal, other.  If you're going to model
> social networks successfully, you're to have to accommodate such unknowns.
>
> The commonality between crystals and social networks, I suppose, is that
> both may be modeled as graphs.  But I'd think that analysing crystals as
> graphs would have many shortcomings and simultaneously so much unused
> theoretical power that you wouldn't bother.
>
> Nu?  Back to you...
>
>                                         Seth
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