Complex Systems Task Group Summaries (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Task Group Summary 5--How can social networks aid our understanding of complexity?
Task Group Summary 5--How can social networks aid our understanding of complexity?
Pages 41-48
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From page 41... ...
Our lack of understanding of macro social networks and human behavior is not due to the lack of technologies to collect the relevant data: thanks to the computerization of most aspects of life, today an increasing amount of information is automatically collected about all of us. Mobile phone companies know who calls whom and where their consumers are; email providers keep detailed records of their consumers' electronic communications; credit card companies and banks can piece together not only their consumers' wealth and spending patterns, but also their travel patterns.
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From page 42... ...
Key Questions The challenge to this working group is identify one or a few research areas that would clearly illustrate the societal benefits of getting access to the currently collected high quality datasets on patterns of human activity, spelling out the societal benefits of this research in a fashion that will be obvious to taxpayers, decision-makers and database owners alike. • Identify one or several key questions pertaining to social networks and human behavior that are of fundamental importance for complexity science and offer significant potential societal payoffs.
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From page 43... ...
Required Reading Butler D Data sharing threatens privacy.
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From page 44... ...
At the 2008 meeting of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Conference on Complex Systems, a multidisciplinary group of researchers focused their energy on the complex system of social networks. The personal connections that people create and destroy everyday form what are known as social networks which influence every aspect of our daily lives from health to knowledge.
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From page 45... ...
The Internet has become an optimum tool for monitoring human behavior. Websites like Facebook and MySpace track whom people befriend and to which organizations they belong.
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From page 46... ...
Information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention along with the Google Trends data allowed the group members to construct a preliminary relationship between Internet searches and real-world effects. Group members examined data from Iowa where there was a mumps outbreak in 2006 and the relationship, if any, to the belief that childhood vaccinations cause autism.
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From page 47... ...
The capacity to examine minute by minute construction of our world through relationships is now possible. Other research priorities include: computational thinking, making the implicit explicit, capturing relational data on a massive scale, accounting for visualizations and dynamics in this new environment, moving society from a snapshot to a moving picture of social networks, and investigating how ideas spread as well as how to spread ideas.
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