Amy's comments

Sorry, but I can't get my weekly comments to show up on my personal class blog. Here they are:

Monge, P. and Contractor, N. (2003). Theories of Communication Networks. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

It comes as no surprise to realize that the chapters for this week also contain an incredible amount of valuable information. There are really great summaries here on embededness, (mutual and reciprocal relationships), collective action theories, contagion theories (how attitudes and behaviors are dissemination through a network), semantic theories, transactive memory theory, exchange theory, and, of particular interest to me in my own work, homophily. Seeing as how I study the communications among individuals with emotional disorders, I like the idea of homophily, that we select individuals for our networks who are similar. This reduces the psychological discomfort that can arise form emotional or cognitive inconsistency. I also find in my work studying how these individuals use the Internet, that the dual effects hypothesis may be very useful. This argues that he internet can simultaneously enlarge and shrink communication networks. The notion that social networks play a buffering role in the effects of stress on mental well being will also be particularly useful for me.

Question: As I commented last week, I am very intrigued by the authors’ premise. I like the idea of being able to study a communications network in its entirety, rather than its tiny separate pieces. As a “numbers geek” I find some comfort in statistics amid the confusion. I like being able to generalize out from one specific type of situation to larger patterns of networks. However, I’m still not clear on exactly how we do this. Where is our data coming from, and how to we compute it?