Dark Days: Social Network Analysis

In the film Dark Days, we witnessed how groups of people, who share the same space, support each other both physically and emotionally. The same concept, or sense of community, can be applied to social media and networks created online. In fact, online communities are actually referred to as “new communities,” essentially, a community unburdened by things such as geography. Using social network analysis, which according to Katherine Giuffre (2013), “concentrates on relations among the members of a system rather than on the individual attributes of those members” (p. 3), we can see a much larger picture of a network or community. This means that studying how social media users are related to each other instead of making one user, the focus can …show more content…
Using Facebook as an example, each user is a node, and the relationship between a user and the people they are friends with, are ties. However, not all ties are equal. People that have a direct or personal relationship, or are connected multiple ways to a user, have stronger ties. The relationship between users in situations where there is no real connection, friends-of-friends for example, creates a weaker tie. In addition, these relationships are social capital, there are two types of social capital, bonding and bridging. In bonding social capital, people have social ties to others in similar locations or within their own group. In bridging social capital, people have social ties with others in different locations or outside of their own group. Social capital is used to measure “networks of trust, interaction, and reciprocity” (Stout et al, 2009, p. 21) therefore, understanding the social capital between relationships with others on Facebook is also very important to network-related …show more content…
In order to answer my question about what type of support other people experience on Facebook, I would need to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. In order to understand the perception people have about their experiences on Facebook, first we need to understand some basic information that can influence thinking. Quantitative data is helpful to determine probabilities and to group people together when performing research. The more common quantitative data that I would look for is age, gender, income, length of participation on Facebook, and time spent on Facebook per day. All of these categories will enable me to look at smaller sections of the community to understand what happens in each. Then, group comparison is much easier. I also need some data that is a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative, such as: do you feel that you find support on Facebook, if so why? The purely qualitative data needed to answer my question is a little tougher, in that it involves asking people to describe their thoughts and feelings. I would need data about how people define support, what type of support are they looking for (physical, emotional) in certain situations (such as a death in the family, financial problems etc.), who offers support, what type of support to they actually receive, if people