894 Reading notes: SNA

Pioneers of Social Network Analysis

A social network diagram displaying friendship ties among a set of Facebook users

By Kencf0618, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The historical background of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is interesting, and Scott’s (2010) account is mostly clear. Unfortunately, however, Scott gets ahead of himself and backtracks at times, so note-taking can be a challenge.  Because he is less than systematic with sticking to his chronology, it also difficult to nail down exactly who did what.  At any rate, the main story appears to be as follows.

Harvard researchers of 1930s began exploring group behavior, particularly in work settings such as factories. They used sociograms to visualize these relationships.  These researchers also discovered the importance of “cliques,” small, non-kinship groupings that are personal and informal.  They discovered that it was productive to diagram and examine these social sub-groups using matrices and beginning to think of them in terms of networks.  They also looked at the relationships between members of cliques, noting the centrality or peripherality of members.  Radcliffe-Brown was one of the key theorists in this early work. In the later 1940s, Homans, another Harvard sociologist, began to synthesize early network approaches, as up to this point theorists with similar methods had not combined their efforts.  Using his synthesized framework, he reinterpreted earlier studies.

Manchester University anthropologists who were looking at tribal and village societies were influenced by Harvard’s Radcliffe-Brown.  But, according to Scott, “they sought to develop his ideas in a novel direction.  Instead of emphasizing integration and cohesion, they emphasized conflict and change” (p. 26).  A key figure was Max Gluckman who looked at African tribal societies in terms of how power operated to maintain stable structures or generate change. In the 1950s, John Barnes took the idea of social network as more than a metaphorical concept and tried to apply it in “a more rigorous and analytical way” (p. 27).  At this point, other scholars began to turn to mathematics and graph theory to develop more rigorous analyses.  Bot, a Canadian researcher studying in the UK, discovered the salience of network ideas and applied them to a study of relations between relatives, friends and neighbors in Britain.  She discovered Barnes’ research and the resulting synergy led to “a major theoretical innovation in British social anthropology” able to “consolidate their advances with further lessons from the American researchers” (p. 29).  Another of these Manchester researchers, Mitchell, was largely responsible for bringing in mathematical approaches, and he also emphasized the internal complexities of network relations, for example, those that involve “a transaction or exchange” (p. 31).  Thus, we began to see the idea of flow within networks. He also looked at the durability and strength of relationships within the network.  A weakness of the British model, however, was to see network models as limited to interpersonal relations and not applicable to general areas of sociology.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s at Harvard where social network analysis really took off.  Here, too, researchers had tinkered with mathematical approaches and now this approach was taken further.  By using SNA to look beyond community settings, they were able to demonstrate its relevance in a more general way.  One important early study, for example, looked at how people learn about job opportunities.

An interesting thing to note in this narrative was how many of the figures “discovered” ideas about network relations and network concepts without realizing that someone else had done, or was doing something similar.  Yes, some of them discovered each other with resulting breakthroughs and theoretical synergy, but it was common for people to apply models in various ways before linking up with what others were doing.  I guess it means that when there are productive connections to be made (note the pun), more than one brain will get there.

Interestingly, people in different fields are still “discovering” that network approaches fit their research interests.  I came across a TED Talk by Nikolas Christakis, a Chicago physician and sociologist who discovered that social network analysis showed interesting effects in the spread of medical conditions such as obesity. He discovered the relevance of the network of social relations in a particular aha moment in an early study and became obsessed with the analysis of social networks and their effects on behavior.

Networked: Some musings

Screenshot from La Paz, Latino community advocacy organization in Chattanooga (click for site)

The main claim that Rainie & Wellman (2012) advance in Networked is that social networks are changing with changing social structures and a more technologized society, but they are not disappearing.  In other words, we are seeing traditional community linkages organized around one’s neighborhood or church affiliation being replaced with linkages that may be more ad hoc and less tightly knit but still able to perform many of the social roles that human beings crave.  The resulting model the authors call “networked individualism.” However, “networked individualism is both socially liberating and socially taxing” (p. 9).  It offers great flexibility but demands time and skill spent in seeking and maintaining connections.  Furthermore, people place even more value on some personal, face-to-face interactions to complement their digital lives and selves.  Digital technologies extend social networks and allow more efficient sharing of information.
This reading makes me think of a research study that I would like to do someday.  A few years ago I spent a day volunteering with a community organization that advocates for the Latino community in Chattanooga.  A significant portion of the community are immigrants from Guatemala, and for this event, the Guatemalan Consulate from Atlanta had sent staffers up to help Chattanooga residents update their Guatemalan passports and register children born in the United States.  However, because many members of this community are illiterate or marginally literate, we volunteers were there to help them fill out the paperwork, even though some of us were non-native speakers of Spanish.  It was an eye-opening experience for me because I found myself working with a community that is doubly cut off from the larger English-speaking community.  First, they are linguistically distanced from the English-speaking majority.  Second, they are at least partially cut off from many Spanish language resources that require literacy that they do not have.  From time to time during my PhD program, I have thought about how interesting it would be to do a study of this community in terms of how they are rhetorically connected. For example, how do they find out that the consulate staffers are coming if they don’t read posters or emails?  Are there announcements on Spanish radio? I am sure there is also word-of-mouth, but where or how do they make these conversational connections? How do they know each other? What role do cell phones play? What are the centers of their community?  How do they share information?  What role do their literate children play—especially since these children are acquiring literacy in a language that does not target this community?  Rainie & Wellman focus on  networked people in the developed world, but I can’t help thinking of communities like this one that occupy many of the same physical communities that we inhabit but have very different patterns of networking and social interaction.

Inspired by Ch. 4: The Mobile Revolution

Reading Deluze & Guattari: Musings on French scholarship

Impressions of Deleuze & Guattari

Photo shot in Collegedale, TN, 2013

Interestingly enough I borrowed Deleuze & Guttari (1987) from a colleague after hearing Theories of Network students talk about rhizomes while I was taking Phelps’ class.  I didn’t yet know that I was going to take the class.  Because the writing style was so surreal, though weirdly not in the totally annoying way that the hypertext people were—or was I biased to like Deleuze & Guattari so I overlooked the fact that it is hard to get traction in this text?  At any rate, after reading Barthes, Cixous, Foucault, and Guattari (Three Ecologies), and Latour, I have begun to wonder about style in French scholarly writing and disciplinarity in French academia.  As far as the former, I don’t mean that these scholars have similar styles because they don’t.  They do, however, seem to have styles that feel less tethered, more sweeping, less step-by-step systematic compared with Anglo-American scholarship.  As far as disciplinarity, I keep finding French scholars who are very hard to pin down in terms of discipline.  Is Foucault a historian, a philosopher, a discourse theorist, a social scientist…?  Are Deleuze and Guattari psychiatrists, literary theorists, social theorists, philosophers…? I suppose the answer is yes. All of the above.  Latour is an anthropologist and a sociologist.  Castells, coming from the French tradition, is a sociologist and a communications scholar.  But British or American scholars don’t seem to have the same range, though they do, at times, changes departments or fields.  My functional linguistics professor in my MA program at UT Arlington, Susan Herring, now does computer-mediated discourse analysis as a professor of information science at Indiana University Bloomington.  Still, arguably that is not a big change.  So what is it with the French scholars?  Does it have to do with university administration or with tracking within the educational system or something else?  Or maybe I need to think of a few American or British scholars who range broadly.  W.J.T Mitchell?  Gunther Kress? Donna Haraway? Gregory Bateson?

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. S. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Scott, J. (2010). Social network analysis: A handbook. Los Angeles, Calif: Sage.

894 Reading Notes: Ecology

Unpacking a definition of ecology

Because I have been interested in applying the concept of ecology as a theoretical construct since I took Dr. Phelps’ Productive Theory Building class last summer, I started reading the Cary Institute’s information about ecology by unpacking their definition of ecology and applying it to writing studies in a tentative sort of way.  According to their definition, ecology is “the scientific study of the processes influencing the distribution and abundance of organisms, the interactions among organisms, and the interactions between organisms and the transformation and flux of energy and matter.”

I started by supposing that if writing studies is not scientific study, it should at least be a systematic study of processes.  Next, I asked myself what processes might be entailed.  Also, once texts are written, how are they distributed?  Of course, to be distributed, they need to be created.  Thus, how are they produced, shaped and then distributed?  What types are there? Why these types?  What generates, shapes, and guides the distribution of these types (genres)?  Next, I considered the concept of “interactions,” the next item in the definition.  Texts interact.  Writers interact.  Readers interact.  Literate activity, then, involves complex interactions.

Finally, I endeavored to apply the idea of “transformation and flux of energy and matter,” by assuming, first, that we might metaphorically connect this to Foucault’s discursive formations.  In other words, “energy” may correlate with cultural capital, with ideas, with, if you will, knowledge.  Ideas have consequences. Ideas are picked up and carried away.  They are shift and change as they collide with other ideas.  Ideas live at different levels and big ideas, like forces, can attract or propel many smaller ideas.  Last, “matter” in the world of semiosis can be, indeed, matter.  Writing uses objects and technologies, which in turn, shape what is communicated and how.  These are things that can be grasped and examined, seen and touched.

I also looked at the Cary Institute’s unpacking of their own definition to stimulate a few more ideas. They start by calling attention to various “unique” aspects of their definition, such as “a starting focus on organisms, aggregations of organisms, or systems incorporating organisms or their by-products.”  Organisms in writing studies probably correlate most obviously with the main organism at issue in all social theory—human agents.  Starting with a focus on human beings in terms of their “aggregations,” we can draw in ideas like that of community, of collective, or more specifically even, discourse community.  Looking at “systems” we might consider education and literate activity more specifically.  Looking at “byproducts,” we might then reach texts in whatever sense we wish to take the term, broader or narrower.  In any case, texts are inarguably the “by-products” of human activity.

The next point was “the bounding of ecology by both the biological and physical sciences.” I’m not sure that we can take this very far metaphorically, except to note that literate activity like ecology overlaps multiple disciplines, reaching from the general human sciences of sociology, psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics, to mixed or specialized fields like economics, geography, political science, education, literature, communication, and so on, and even extending, arguably to the natural sciences, at least in minor ways. 

The next few points can be dismissed with fairly quick comments.  For example, “the breadth of subject matters within ecology” simply reminded me that rhetoric and writing studies as conceived more ecologically have also attained more breadth than in the past.  Because I didn’t know the terms biotic and abiotic when I first read the article, I’ll skip the next couple of points.  However, the fact that “the relationships between organisms and the physical world can be bidirectional” definitely makes sense for writing studies.  It reminds me of the structuration theory of Giddens (1984).  Agents change society, society changes agents.

Applying the core idea of ecology to writing studies could be productive.  Again to quote, “the disciplinary focus is on ‘processes’, ‘interactions’ and ‘relations’ rather than on the physical entities per se.” I think that this idea could be a game changer for writing studies.  In other words, the focus will not only be on humans as writers (not process studies, like all those 1970s and ‘80s studies), nor as subjects with identities (postmodernism), nor on texts as standalone products, but rather on the flux and flow between multiple texts, between texts and world, between text and writers, between cultural concepts and texts, and all of the above as mediated through genres.  I think we can also embrace this notion: “The hallmark of ecology is its encompassing and synthetic view of nature, not a fragmented view.”  All in all, it was at least interesting for me to think about the ways that ecology might be a productive metaphor for my purposes, and this article was interesting to think with.

Some terms from Spellman

Etymology from Spellman (p. 4)

photo taken in Puerto Rico, December 2015

Spellmen offered a collection of terms that I may find useful when (or if) I apply ecology as a theory.  In fact, I didn’t realize that he offered a glossary until I got to the end of chapter 1, so my notes here come from the body of the chapter rather than the glossary.

• Abiotic—Means “non-living”
• Habitat—Refers to the“physical and biological environment in which an organism lives” (p. 14)
• Niche—Defined as “the role the organism plays in the environment” (p. 14), it is metaphorically linked to “profession” by Odum (see p. 15).
• Homeostasis—Can be defined as the “dynamic balance... maintained among all biotic and abiotic factors” (p. 15).
• Ecosystems—“Defined as a geographic area and includes all the living organisms, their physical surroundings, and the natural cycles that sustain them. All of these elements are interconnected…the major ecological unit in nature” (p. 15)
• Autotropic—Meaning “self-nourishing,” this “component does not require food from its environment but can manufacture food from inorganic substances” (p. 15).  An example is photosynthesis.
• Heterotrophic—Autotrophic components serve as food for heterotrophic ones.
• Population—“A population in an ecological sense is a group of organisms, of the same species, which roughly occupy the same geographical area at the same time” (p. 62).

The Three Ecologies: A summary

What is driving Guattari’s essay is the sense that overpopulation, capitalism, mass media and other forces have converged to create an “ecological disequilibrium” that “will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface” if action is not taken (p. 19).  The only solution is “an ethico-political articulation,” namely, the three ecologies, “environment, social relations and human subjectivity,” which together he calls ecosophy (p. 19-20).  This program will only succeed if it “brings about an authentic political, social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets” (p. 20).  Some consequences of the disequilibrium to which he is referring is that even communist countries have succumbed to “mass-media serialism,” that underdeveloped countries have seen “the long-term establishment of immense zones of misery, hunger, and death” caused by global capitalism (p. 21), and that developed countries have seen “chronic unemployment and increasing marginalization” of large parts of the population, along with “an exacerbation of questions relative to immigration and racism” (p. 22).  The hope that he articulates here is that “social ecosophy will consist in developing specific practices that modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family, in an urban context or at work, etc.” (p. 24).  At the same time, “mental ecosophy will lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries of life and death,’” which will lead individuals from the homogenizing forces of the mass market, media, fashions, and pop culture.  

Quotes I Like

This is a long quote, but for me, it captures the main idea of Syverson.  Interestingly, I first read this excerpt last summer, and I was interested to see that this passage had caught my attention then, too:  

“I would argue that writers, readers, and texts form just such a complex system of self-organizing, adaptive, and dynamic interactions. But even beyond this level of complexity, they are actually situated in an ecology, a larger system that includes environmental structures, such as pens, paper, computers, books, telephones, fax machines, photocopiers, printing presses, and other natural and human-constructed features, as well as other complex systems operating at various levels of scale, such as families, global economies, publishing systems, theoretical frames, academic disciplines, and language itself. For my purposes, then, an ecology is a kind of meta-complex system composed of interrelated and interdependent complex systems and their environmental structures and processes. And my principal question is this: Can the concepts currently emerging in diverse fields on the nature of complex systems provide us with a new understanding of composing as an ecological system?” (Syverson, 1999, p. 5)

The following quote from Spellman (2008) seems valuable to me not only because it captures a key idea about ecology as a science, but because it also reminds me of Bateson’s ideas from last week and because the emphasis on relationships here demonstrates why “ecology” has been a productive metaphor for some in writing studies.  

“Ecology shows us that each living organism has an ongoing and continual relationship with every other element that makes up our environment. Simply, ecology is all about interrelationships, intraspecific and interspecific, and on how important it is to maintain these relationships—to ensure our very survival.” (p. 6)

“We need to ‘kick the habit’ of sedative discourse, particularly the ‘fix’ of television, in order to be able to apprehend the world through the interchangeable lenses or points of views of the three ecologies” (p. 28).  This quote reminds me of a political blog by Matt Taibbi where he traces Donald Trump’s current success in his presidential campaign, ultimately, to the dumbing down effects of television.

Which leads me to another quote, which I’m afraid will indicate my political bias:  “In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City” (p. 29)—and entire swaths of delegates?

A final quote on the same theme: “It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity” (p. 29).  The shrill and mean-spirited political discourse that we’re seeing these days made me feel that this quote was quite apropos. 

References

Cary Institute. (2016). Definition of ecology. Retrieved from http://www.caryinstitute.org/discover-ecology/definition-ecology

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guattari, F. (2012). The three ecologies. London: Continuum.

Spellman, F. R. (2008). Ecology for nonecologists. Lanham, Md: Government Institutes.

Syverson, M. A. (1999). The wealth of reality: An ecology of composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.