Aj keď máte stovky facebookovských priateľov, skutočný vplyv na vás majú piati-šiesti z nich
Wired: How deeply do the online social networks run or are they just the McDonald’s version of networks, and how much do they influence us?
Christakis: We are influenced by our friends, but we are not influenced by our acquaintances, at least not to the same extent. People have just assumed that . . . if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we’re not. We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or 6 real friends.
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I know Tom and Dick, and when Tom and Dick in turn know each other, you have a transitive relationship and you get a closed triangle. Brian Uzzi found that if you took the group of people that were producing the musical, how successful the musical was deeply related to how transitive the production company was. So if nobody had ever worked with each other before, the transitivity was very low, the show was a flop. If everybody had worked together before, the show was a flop. . . . However if there was intermediate transitivity and some of the people knew each other and some did not, the show was a runaway success. . . .
There’s an optimal amount of connection to maximize success. . . . What you want is the right balance between some people who have worked together before and trust each other plus some new blood. . . . The point is that how I take a group and interconnect it affects the productivity of the group.
Christakis: We are influenced by our friends, but we are not influenced by our acquaintances, at least not to the same extent. People have just assumed that . . . if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we’re not. We and others have done a bunch of work to show that if your real friends online say or do something, it affects you. But if your acquaintances online say or do something, it does not. People on average have about 106 Facebook friends, but only 5 or 6 real friends.
...
I know Tom and Dick, and when Tom and Dick in turn know each other, you have a transitive relationship and you get a closed triangle. Brian Uzzi found that if you took the group of people that were producing the musical, how successful the musical was deeply related to how transitive the production company was. So if nobody had ever worked with each other before, the transitivity was very low, the show was a flop. If everybody had worked together before, the show was a flop. . . . However if there was intermediate transitivity and some of the people knew each other and some did not, the show was a runaway success. . . .
There’s an optimal amount of connection to maximize success. . . . What you want is the right balance between some people who have worked together before and trust each other plus some new blood. . . . The point is that how I take a group and interconnect it affects the productivity of the group.
Now I should say it’s not always that way. Sometimes more transitivity is just better. If you’re trying to assemble a terrorist organization, you want to minimize transitivity – less and less is always better, because if the cops catch one of the bad guys, if he doesn’t know anyone else in the organization, he can’t bring it down.
