Social Network Systems

History of Social Network Systems

Human society consists of social networks made of people. The study of social networks was preceded by studies on community and social groups in the 20th century. In the early 1930s, J. L. Moreno started mapping social connections among individuals, which signified the emergence of sociometric techniques in the study of social networks. A picture of social networks can reflect the structure of friendships, leaderships, and other social environments. Network systems are connections between objects that can be illustrated by graphs using nodes and edges.

Social networks serve as conduits by which ideas flow through groups of people. Any individual in the network can reach anyone else in the same network using a short path. This is the theoretical base for the experiment of six degrees of separation conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. The study of six degrees of separation explored the small-world phenomenon, which [Page 1637]studies the possibility of two arbitrarily selected individuals knowing each other through a mutual acquaintance or a series of mutual acquaintances.

A social network is different from an information network in that an information network is made of links between information resources, such as computers or other devices that relay messages. Also, edges in social networks are relationships between individuals. Edges in information networks, however, are logical connections such as hyperlinks, citations, or cross-references.

In recent years, the study of social networks has moved its focus to computer-mediated communication. The Internet has changed the study of social network systems profoundly. Today’s Internet is based on the ARPANET that was built in 1970, which had 13 sites when it was in its nascent form. The Internet was introduced in the early 1980s as a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks. In its beginning stage, the Internet was only accessible to research and education organizations in the United States. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As of 2012, the number of Internet-connected devices was estimated to be eight to ten billion.

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