Week8...

There are a lot of network theories summarized in this week's reading, that are somewhat social psychology oriented rather than sociology. I felt it as a kind of turnpike for this course. I took particular interest in the cognitive approaches, which basically emphasize how people make sense of such structures. Being from an Asian culture where there is actually a stronger sense of social connectedness than the "west", it interests me how social networks are held together by the viewpoints of the 'nodes'. Of course it happens that in many cases, the cognized network by an individual in it does not fully correpond to the actual structure (e.g. exaggerated feeling of having democracy, feeling more socially active than one actually is, etc), and making people recognize those differences can function as an motivation for change. I like the problem settings of Gramsciin which he asks why a revolution didn't occur, and eventually invented the concept of hegemony; Implemeting theories of cognitive social structures, even (quantitavely?) observable data could be considered. Focusing on communication networks, it could be also helpful in finding out how Internet-based networks such the "blogosphere" is actually being perceived as an tool for bringing about changes. However the tricky thing is, that to achive those goals the comparison BETWEEN the cogized network of each individuals(nodes) and the actual structure of the network must be conducted. But in many cases, the non-surface networks can be explored only through the information reported by the nodes themselves, and then it would get mixed up. Methodological questions on how to obtain observational data is still giving me headaches(and probably will for the rest of my academic life, I guess).