This excellent slide show by Jyri Engestrom seeks to shed some theoretical light on the way social media networks function in terms of “social objects”. It’s pretty easy to make sense of even without the accompanying lecture, and if you’re interested in the way social networks currently function and the ways in which they are likely to evolve, it’s well worth a view.
However, it’s also worth pointing out that this falls in the ever-growing category of Social Media Network Theory ® - you read it here first - not to be confused with Social Network Theory, which “views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors.” Many of the concepts in this slideshow derive from this model of human behaviour.
Don’t be concerned that this theoretical analysis isn’t about wealth creation - as slide 4 points out very directly, “Create a Facebook application like ‘Top Friends’ which has almost 3 million active users, and you could be in for some serious Internet dough.”
It doesn’t say whether the dough is for a virtual pizza-base, thus requiring several additional (expensive) toppings to render it palatable, or whether it is to be baked into a loaf of serious Internet bread, thus requiring a hot oven and this burning some ever-more-expensive fuel and increasing the carbon footprint. But it does give in-depth overviews, and some excellent insight, and illustrates key ways of understanding human group behaviour within the social media networks where so many individuals now choose to spend vast amounts of leisure time.
Expect also to see the field of Social Media Network Theory ® (remember: you read it here first) grow ever more abstract and lucrative…
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