Social Network/ing Week at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto kicked off tonight with a fas­cin­at­ing key­note by Cornell’s Jon Klein­berg. kleinberg.gif‘The Geo­graphy of Social and Inform­a­tion Net­works,’ was one of the most fas­cin­at­ing applied math­em­at­ical lec­tures I can say to hav­ing ever atten­ded (and before I go too far I will stress that the math was made very, very approach­able for a layper­son such as myself). His intro­du­cer indic­ated that he inven­ted algorithmic soci­ology and although this soun­ded rather pre­sump­tu­ous (an Al Gore and the Inter­net sort of thing?), I can’t help but be quite will­ing to give this some cre­dence after listen­ing to this present­a­tion.
Klein­berg opened with a quote from Jim Gray, that “the emer­gence of cyber­space and the world wide web was like the dis­cov­ery of a new con­tin­ent.” Klein­berg was quite delib­er­ate in this jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the geo­graphic with the tech­no­lo­gical and he then teased this into a fur­ther merge with the social. But he ques­tioned whether maps are actu­ally an appro­pri­ate meta­phor for some­thing as aphys­ical as social net­works — but chose to let this stand on the need to have some com­mon vocab­u­lary with which to be able to relate.

Klein­berg con­sidered the evol­u­tion from Milgram’s Small World Exper­i­ment of 1968, through the more recent Watts and Strogatz’s work with the MSN net­work which attemp­ted a more algorithmic approach, but largely sub­stan­ti­ated the earlier work. Kleinberg’s own work with Live­Journal attemp­ted to intro­duce less ran­dom­ness to the hypo­thesis and move away from simple close­ness to a ranked approach that has applic­a­tions to the spread of epidemics.

The real meat of the talk was in the con­clu­sion (and I think that this has now been thrown out there for the rest of the con­fer­ence to fur­ther dis­cuss). No one is ques­tion­ing that social net­works exist and have exis­ted through­out time. Nor are we ques­tion­ing that tech­no­lo­gies have enabled new and poten­tially more effect­ive forms of com­mu­nic­a­tion. What is really quite stun­ning, and paradigm-shifting is that these net­works are now made vis­ible. He quoted him­self from an inter­view in the Globe and Mail in which he claimed that “MySpace is awk­ward because it makes vis­ible the invis­ible. It makes pub­lic what should be private. It doesn’t just cre­ate social net­works, it ana­tom­izes them and spreads them out like a digest­ive track on the autopsy table so that you can see what is con­nec­ted to what and who is con­nec­ted to whom.” And this is where I sud­denly clued in. The net­work isn’t new, but the fact that it is now made vis­ible and that this can then have impact on how it is con­struc­ted and func­tions is rad­ic­ally new. The net­work then becomes the object and self-reflective. Soon he pos­its, soft­ware will know more about you then you know about your­self and not only does this demand a need for bet­ter com­pu­ta­tional mod­els to ana­lyse the net­work, but more import­antly we will learn a lot more about large pop­u­la­tions and about indi­vidual beha­viour rais­ing huge con­cerns about insti­tu­tion­al­ized lack of pri­vacy.