Social Networks and Terrorism

This chapter explains how international terror networks, consisting of individuals and organizations spanning countries and continents, form and evolve. It describes tools and methods used by social network analysts to study such networks; their applications by counterterrorist organizations; their limitations and problems in data collection and analysis; and directions for future research. It also discusses a few recent case studies by prominent researchers.

Towards a Bespoke Framework for Eliciting Consumer Satisfaction in Second Life

The approach taken to data gathering, analysis, and interpretation in the context of the framework is described; as well as refinements made to the framework as a consequence of emergent themes revealed through the analysis of the gathered data.

Observing the Evolution of a Learning Community Using Social Network Analysis

During the last decades, social and computer scientists have been focusing their efforts to study the effectiveness of collaboration in both working and learning environments. The main contributions clearly identify the importance of interactivity as the determinant of positive performances in learning communities where the supportive dimension of exchanges is balanced by the interactive one. In this chapter, authors describe a method based on social network metrics to recognize the stages of development of learning communities. The authors found that the evolution of social network metrics - such as density, betweenness centrality, contribution index, core/periphery structure – matched the formal stages of community development, with a clear identification of the forming, norming, and storming phases.

Bringing Qualitative and Quantitative Data Together

In this chapter, the authors investigate the issue of gathering network-related social data by means of both qualitative and quantitative methodology. An overview of the most relevant visual approaches such as network pictures and different kinds of network maps (“paper and pencil”, “paper, pen, and tokens,” and “digital network maps”) will be given, including an example of a migration study in which a network survey was carried out with the aid of the software program VennMaker. Finally, the authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of data collection based on digital network maps and make suggestions for future research.

Social Network, Information Flow and Decision-Making Efficiency

Every day, millions of humans make decisions about issues of interest for the group they represent. Equivalent processes have already been well described for animal societies. Many animal species live in groups and have to take collective decisions to synchronize their activities. However, group members not only have to take decisions satisfying the majority of individuals (i.e. decision accuracy) but also have a relatively short period to do so (i.e. decision speed). In decision-making, speed and accuracy are often opposed. The decision efficiency will vary according to the way individuals are inter-connected, namely according to the social network. However, the traditional approach used in management and decision sciences has been revealed to be insufficient to fully explain decision-making efficiency. This chapter addresses the question of how social network may enhance collective decision-making by increasing both the accuracy and the speed of decisions. Studies within different animal species are discussed. These studies include human beings, and combine field experiments, social network analysis, and modelling to illustrate how the study of animals may contribute to our understanding of decision-making in humans.

Social Network Sites

The internet and the emergence of social technologies and platforms are at the origin of new consumer trends. The growing empowerment of customers is having a restructuring impact in business-consumer relationships and it is pressing businesses to uncover new strategies to engage their clients. This chapter argues that the presence of the corporate sector in Social Network Sites (SNSs) presents a successful method of building proficient relationships with customers that are more compliant with the new facets of consumers’ profile and behaviour. This research crosses classical academic literature with case studies available in social media to gather a compilation of challenges and potential solutions to the application of SNSs to business-consumer relationships. This compilation is preceded by an introductory section, which explores the definition and possible applications of SNSs in business, and a section dedicated to an overview of the novel consumer trends.

Civic Engagement and Communication Technology Networks

The researcher investigated face-to-face, telephone, email, private electronic, and public electronic communication networks. Private electronic communication networks develop through text messaging, instant messaging, and private chat, and public electronic communication networks emerge through the exchange of messages over blogs, social network sites, and Twitter. Results indicate individuals used different technology to develop different networks to assist them in different ways. Public electronic communication was unrelated to civic engagement.

Community Structure Extraction for Social Networks

In this work, community structure extraction essentially resorts to its solution to graph partition problem. The authors explore two different approaches. The spectral approach is based on the minimization of balanced cut and its resulting solution comes from the spectral decomposition of the graph Laplacian. The modularity based approach is based on the maximization of modularity and implemented in a hierarchical fashion. In practice, the approach can extract useful information from the community structure, such as what is the most influential component in a given community. Being able to identify and group friends on social networks, the technique can provide a customized advertisement based on their interests. This can have a big return in terms of marketing efficiency. Community structure can also be used for network visualization and navigation. As a result, it can be seen which groups or which pages have more interaction, thus giving a clear image for navigation purposes.

Knowledge Discovery from Online Communities

This chapter presents an overview of social network features such as user behavior, social models, and user-generated content to highlight the most notable research trends and application systems built over such appealing models and online media data. It first describes the most popular social networks by analyzing the growth trend, the user behaviors, the evolution of social groups and models, and the most relevant types of data continuously generated and updated by the users. Next, the most recent and valuable applications of data mining techniques to social network models and user-generated content are presented. Discussed works address both social model extractions tailored to semantic knowledge inference and automatic understanding of the user-generated content. Finally, prospects of data mining research on social networks are provided as well.

The Social Construction of New Cultural Models through Information and Communication Technologies

This chapter presents an approach to sociological and anthropological theories as to the meaning of the new cultural formats resulting from the application of today’s communications technologies. This introductory theoretical chapter aims to contextualize social networking and community behaviour within an analytical framework, which allows us to understand the significance of these new realities. Thus, this chapter analyzes the cultural significance of the new concept of cyberculture and the new socio-cultural constructs such as authority, identity, and socialization that arise from the use of new technologies as a basic source of knowledge and information. In summary, this chapter contains a theoretical reflection on the meaning of the new forms of social relations in this ICT-based culture, as well as on the need to define new analytical tools to enable an adequate interpretation of this new cultural context within the framework of globalization and digitalization.