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Everything Is Obvious

Page 34

by Duncan J. Watts


  21. Clearly Facebook is an imperfect representation of everyone’s friendship network: Not everyone is on Facebook, so some close friends may be missing, while many “friends” are barely acquainted in real life. Counting mutual friends can help differentiate between genuine and illusory friendships, but this method is also imperfect, as even casual acquaintances on Facebook may share many mutual friends. A better approach would be to observe how frequently friends communicate or perform other kinds of relational acts (e.g., clicking on a newsfeed item, commenting, liking, etc.); however, this data is not yet available to third-party developers.

  22. For details of the Friend Sense study, see Goel, Mason, and Watts (2010).

  23. Projection is a well-studied phenomenon in psychology, but it has been difficult to measure in social networks, for much the same reasons that have stymied network research in general. For a review of the projection literature, see Krueger and Clement (1994), Krueger (2007), and Robbins and Krueger (2005).

  24. See Aral, Muchnik, and Sundararajan (2009) for a recent study of influence in viral marketing.

  25. For other recent work using e-mail data see, Tyler et al. (2005), Cortes et al. (2003), Kossinets and Watts (2006), Malmgren et al. (2009), De Choudhury et al. (2010), and Clauset and Eagle (2007). For related work using cell-phone data, see Eagle et al. (2007) and Onnela et al. (2007); and for work using instant messaging data, see Leskovec and Horvitz (2008).

  26. For information on the progress on cancer see an excellent series of articles, “The Forty Years War” published in the New York Times. Search “forty years war cancer” or go to http://bit.ly/c4bsc9. For a similar account of the genomics revolution, see recent articles by Wade (2010) and Pollack (2010).

  27. I have made a similar argument elsewhere (Watts 2007), as have a number of other authors (Shneiderman 2008; Lazer et al. 2009).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Duncan Watts is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. Prior to joining Yahoo!, he was a full professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he taught from 2000 to 2007. His research on social networks and collective behavior has appeared in a wide range of journals from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and the Harvard Business Review. He is the author of two previous books, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton University Press, 1999). He holds a BSc in physics from the Australian Defence Force Academy, from which he also graduated with an officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University. He lives in New York City.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Preface: A Sociologist’s Apology

  Part I - Common Sense

  Chapter 1 - The Myth of Common Sense

  Chapter 2 - Thinking About Thinking

  Chapter 3 - The Wisdom (and Madness) of Crowds

  Chapter 4 - Special People

  Chapter 5 - History, the Fickle Teacher

  Chapter 6 - The Dream of Prediction

  Part II - Uncommon Sense

  Chapter 7 - The Best-Laid Plans

  Chapter 8 - The Measure of All Things

  Chapter 9 - Fairness and Justice

  Chapter 10 - The Proper Study of Mankind

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

 

 

 


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