John Connell: The Blog

Use­ful dia­gram from David J Carr, built on an ear­lier Spec­trum of Online Friend­ship from Mike Arauz.

It is inter­est­ing though to con­trast and com­pare the impli­ca­tions of David’s dia­gram with the study look­ing at how infor­ma­tion is shared on Face­book, pub­lished on the Face­book Data Page: Rethink­ing Infor­ma­tion Diver­sity in Net­works. The report basi­cally states that:

.…even though peo­ple are more likely to con­sume and share infor­ma­tion that comes from close con­tacts that they inter­act with fre­quently (like dis­cussing a photo from last night’s party), the vast major­ity of infor­ma­tion comes from con­tacts that they inter­act with infre­quently. These dis­tant con­tacts are also more likely to share novel infor­ma­tion, demon­strat­ing that social net­works can act as a pow­er­ful medium for shar­ing new ideas, high­light­ing new prod­ucts and dis­cussing cur­rent events.

David’s dia­gram is about the whole matrix of online rela­tion­ships, while the report relates to Face­book only, but do they con­cur with each other? I’m not so sure.

Tech­no­rati Tags: online rela­tion­ships, social tech­nol­ogy, infor­ma­tion shar­ing, face­book