Our Personal Networks: A Methodology Moment

We get our political information in lots of ways -- the news media, obviously, but also from the people we talk to every day, our social network.

It's the latter that is the focus of an article in the most recent issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. The authors look at two different ways of generating survey data about people's social networks.  As the authors write:

"One method asks respondents to provide information about the individuals with whom they discuss 'important matters,' while the other asks respondents to provide information about the individuals with whom they discuss politics.  We find that respondents provide more or less the same data on their political discussion partners regardless of which name generator procedure is used."

My first thought was -- wow, cool, you can get published with a null finding.

My second thought was -- there's leeway in how we study social networks, allowing us to confidently compare studies with slightly different methods.  Useful.

The authors conclude that our "core and political discussion networks comprise the same individuals."  In other words, we talk to the same people ... politics, or not.

That's good to know from a methodological standpoint.  I assumed people carve their larger social networks into smaller chunks.  This chunk is made up of people you talk about politics with, that chunk is people you talk music with, that other chunk is for religion, etc.  Maybe some overlap, but I always assumed there were differences.  This research suggests not.

I'm a bit skeptical. Maybe I'm generalizing from an N of 1, but maybe the lack of a result here has more to do with a methodological quirk in the wording ("important matters" versus "politics") than in how we consciously or unconsciously create our interpersonal networks.  I don't know.  My gut says the method here is too mild to truly capture differences in our interpersonal networks.  The lack of results are useful, especially if you want to combine data from different approaches in a larger analysis, but I don't think we can say quite yet that we have the same interpersonal network for everything.

Social Networks -- as Predictors of Popularity

This appeals to my inner geek, the idea of using social networks as a way to predict the next big hit in pop music. 

This article (warning: math) asks whether it's better to rely in the intrinsic qualities of music or on social networking to predict that next song to run up the charts.  I won't get into the math but the methodology looks sound to me. The authors used last.fm as source material for user tags to create a "folksonomy of music."

The result?  Mining the music social networking data does a pretty damn good job of identifying popular songs.  Cool.

Why am I so fascinated? 

Think of the ways we might mine Twitter or Facebook or whatever tomorrow's social networking flavor of the year happens to be to predict the success of a policy, like health care, or even of a candidate's run for office.  If we take social networks to roughly sum up the group mind, then tapping into that should be an interesting snapshot -- not unlike that of a traditional public opinion poll.  I see this as another way of understanding what people think and know about the important, and not-so-important, issues of the day.

Yeah, the math and algorithms are not for the casual user.  Gotta work out the kinks, but I suspect someone will come up with off-the-shelf and on-the-net ways for paid users to do this kind of analysis.

Hypo Time

A couple of days ago I blogged about social networking and people's perception of public opinion, and whether the former influences the latter. Skimming that blog may help this post make more sense (but no promises, it's me after all).

I've always been interested in people's perception of opinion. We tend to project our own opinions on the public at large. In other words, we tend to think others think the same way we do, what the social scientists sometimes call projection but based also on the fact we tend to hang out with people much like ourselves, thus skewing our perception of opinion for a broader public.

I've been wondering whether social networking, at being tied in to the mundane and profound thoughts of so many friends and quasi-friends, can influence our perceptions of opinion. Thus, I'm gonna toss out a few possible hypotheses over the next day or two.

Hypothesis 1: The greater the use of social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), the greater the likelihood one will perceive other people agreeing with your own opinion.

Huh? Wouldn't more information make you more accurate, not less so? I don't think so. First off, we tend to link to people like ourselves, even if they're only barely friends, so that should increase the likelihood we'll think the world agrees with us because that's all the opinions we see expressed. Our narrow little worlds make us a bit more likely to overestimate how many people agree with us, and I think social networking only accelerates, not moderates, this effect. I'd love to see this tested.

Hypothesis 2: Social networking posts include only poll information that favors a poster's point of view, not poll results that run counter to a poster's ideological or partisan position.

This one kinda makes more sense, or at least is not counter-intuitive. There are exceptions, the people who put on a Facebook news feed some poll that they think shows how dumb people are, but overall I expect to see confirmatory information, which in turn would lead to Hypothesis 1 being supported.

Hypothesis 3: Attempts to shift public opinion via social networking will ultimately fail.

Yeah, a crappily-worded hypothesis, but I'm short of time and didn't want to get all PhDweeb on it, but the above hypo in its various forms has significant meaning for people in politics, public relations, and even journalism. Basically I'm arguing, and need to explore this further, that social networking, even at its most viral, does little to nudge public opinion. It might move perceptions of opinion.

To me, Facebook is the big guy in this test. Twitter, less so. Too ephemeral, too silly, too confined. But Facebook with its updates and news feeds, that's a place ripe for examination by people interested in what moves public opinion, or moves perceptions of that opinion (to me a more interesting theoretical question).

The Borg and Social Networking

I've mentioned it before but there's this great definition of public opinion:

Public opinion is no more than this,
what people think other people think.

It's a line I use in my grad class on public opinion, on a research paper I published a coupla years ago, and probably too often in casual conversation. I've always been fascinated in people's perception of opinion and how they tend to project their own opinions on the public at large. In other words, if I think this way, most people think this way (false consensus).

Yeah yea, but so what? Well, I was in a doctoral meeting the other day and we were talking about social networking (Twitter, Facebook, et al.) and it struck me that we now have, thanks to technology, access to a "group mind" of sorts -- we know what other people think. This kinda changes the dynamics of spiral of silence, of pluralistic ignorance, of false consensus, and all those other great theories that rest on the notion of people and their perception of opinion.

Someone needs to study this stuff.

It's kinda borg like, if you remember Star Trek Next Generation. The borg operated on a linked group mind and warned our heroes: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." Tweets and Facebook posts and all the rest, are they a potential groupmind, a creator of consensus, or are they merely shouting into the dark to people who really aren't reading the posts in the first place?

My own hunch is we're going to see some influence on people's perception of public opinion if they happen to use these social networking tools -- but not in the way you might think. Selective exposure to similar others, hanging out with people like yourself, is one reason we tend to project our own opinion (or of a handful of others) on the public at large. If our various social networking links resemble our real world interpersonal relationships (people a lot like us) then this actually increases our likelihood to project our own opinions on the world at large. If our social digital networks are broader (I hope so, but not sure, again to be studied) then perhaps this will mediate this tendency in people.

Sunday morning thoughts after too much coffee, I admit, so enough of the theoretical, unless of course later today something about this comes to mind and I have to shout it out to the darkness.

Oh, on a historical note, that great quote is from a book entitled Prince Lucifer by Alfred Austin. Lucifer is one who says it, which is kinda neat. Came across it in graduate school and have used it, off and on, many times since.

Social Media

Everyone knows social media are the big thing -- Twitter, Facebook, and a host of others just around the corner and waiting impatiently for their turn to be mentioned by Stephen Colbert.

Adam Ostrow wrote recently about the fastest growing social media on Mashable (cool site). Yeah, Twitter up 2,500 percent in a year. Yeah, Facebook passes MySpace (thank god). Also watch out for Ning and Bebo and -- sigh -- LinkedIn. (I'm not bothering with live links. You can find 'em on your own by using such creative url guesses as twitter.com).

Okay, so the what people know connection? Too easy. As well as being places for social networking and meat markets for checking people out (admit it, job #1), people also pick up snippets of news and other information on these things. My Facebook feed usually includes links and embeds of news stories from around the web that "friends" in my network have posted. Given we tend to be grazers online, skimming a headline here, reading a couple of graphs there, the social network sites become merely another place where we can chomp and chew on a bit of cud news.

Does this lead to quality political knowledge? Nope, not even close, but in a world of talking political potato heads like Sean Hannity we can only hope people glean at little real news along the way.