Social Networks – Linking these ideas together
While my full understanding of social networks is greatly disadvantaged by my lack of mathematical skills, I still get the six degree theory and like many find it fascinating. Unlike many, though, I advocate that social networking models can be used to determine relationships and may be a key factor which in increasing information technologies utilization in counterterrorism analysis and other group threat relationships.
In a relatively brief article in Science, DJ Watts et al. simply proclaim, “our model suggest that searchability is a generic property of real-world social networks.” Their additional conclusions lead one to believe that relationships can be determined by searching only a few known dimensions. So what? This means if terrorism experts or cyber crime investigators can determine what those similar dimensions are and can determine that they are specific unto the suspect groups/individuals then it should allow for more fruitful data-mining searches by highlighting certain nodes and chains and also decreasing the production of false positives.
While not the focus of my research, another interesting topic to explore would be looking at social networks in comparison to, or in conjunction with the development of organic groups whose organization has been encouraged by the Internet (as read in Johnson’s Two Ways to Emerge; and how to tell the difference between them ). Further, and perhaps time will permit for my examination, of the use of social networking and how leader/individual/group decision making is determined or what other influences can be seen when looking at the many variables involved with development of social networks. Again, hard sciences often have the upper hand in development but there is much importance in incorporating the soft sciences into these new innovations.