In the second week, we decided to focus on the connection and how to make the information connectiveness more organic. Therefore, we read a lot of theories on connectiveness, such as database connection as well as social network connection.
A database connection is a link to a thread running in the database process that is blocked and waiting for an input from another thread in another process. Connections are a key concept in data-centric programming. Since some DBMS engines require considerable time to connect, connection pooling was invented to improve performance. A good data connection can improve the efficiency of information processing.
Photo: MySQL database connection in Python
In addition, Six degrees of separation and Dunbar's number theories play a big role in the interpersonal network. Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. Also known as the 6 Handshakes rule. As a result, a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. For example, In 2014, LinkedIn rolled out a new feature called “How You’re Connected” which allowed users to see details about the relationship between two connections that may not be in your network. The addition of this tool made it easier for LinkedIn users to analyze their own graph of connections by making it more clear who is a strong relationship and who is a weak relationship within their own and other professional networks. Six Degrees of Separation is Vital for Business to some extent.
A significant yet often overlooked component of people’s information environments is composed of the relationships that they use to acquire information and knowledge. If we can visualize and understand the myriad of relationships, then we may can either facilitate or impede knowledge creation and transfer.
Photo: KU CAREER CENTER
But beyond that, Dunbar's number introduced that why we can maintain 150 relationships. According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the “magic number” is 150. Dunbar became convinced that there was a ratio between brain sizes and group sizes through his studies of non-human primates. This ratio was mapped out using neuroimaging and observation of time spent on grooming, an important social behaviour of primates. Dunbar concluded that the size, relative to the body, of the neocortex – the part of the brain associated with cognition and language – is linked to the size of a cohesive social group. This ratio limits how much complexity a social system can handle.
According to the theory, the tightest circle of human has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.
When people have more than 150 friends on Facebook or 150 followers on Twitter, Dunbar argues, these represent the normal outer layers of contacts (or the low-stakes connections): the 500 and 1500. For most people, intimacy may just not be possible beyond 150 connections. “These digital media – and I’m including telephones in there – are really just providing you with another mechanism for contacting friends,” Dunbar says.
The most intimate circle is just five loved ones, reaching a maximum of 1500 people you can recognise (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont)
After our literature review, we found that social network may can help people to improve their knowledge creation and sharing, so we spent more time on some books about human relationships as well as knowledge sharing rather than reorganising the information structures in Hoffman Resource Centre's website. When we read a various of research of Mark Granovetter, a American sociologist, we found a keyword "weak ties" that may help us to get inspiration.
Implications of the Dunbar Number in Collective Intelligence based on Social Network Services
There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances — not our friends — are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency. Some social media also use weak ties to expend people's social network. For instance, people alway use hashtags to identify a particular topic in facebook as well as twitter; in this situation, social media may serve to frame the discussion, plus, the ultimate example of the ways in which Twitter can fuel a social movement through weak ties comes from the Arab Spring of 2011. During the Egyptian uprising there were more than 1 million tweets that some suggest provided motivation to join the movement. To some extent, weak ties actually help people to acquire information and expand their social networks.
Reference
Guare, J., 1990. Six degrees of separation: A play. Vintage.
Dunbar, R., Dunbar’s number”. How many friends does one person need, pp.21-34.
Abouzeid, A., Bajda-Pawlikowski, K., Abadi, D., Silberschatz, A. and Rasin, A., 2009. HadoopDB: an architectural hybrid of MapReduce and DBMS technologies for analytical workloads. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2(1), pp.922-933.