I saw this today on Mashable and loved it. Wonder if we truly realize what impact Facebook has had on communication and on the way we do community.

This is an interview in Seed Magazine all about Networks.

THE PHYSICIST AND THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST DISCUSS CONTAGION AND THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN, DEBATE THE NATURAL SELECTION OF ROBUSTNESS AND ASK WHETHER SOCIETY IS TURNING INWARD.

ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI: It is becoming a truism that we’re living in the era of networks. Just about anywhere we turn, we encounter one. We have the World Wide Web and the internet; we have social networks, genetic networks, and biochemical networks. These things — web pages, genes, chemicals in our cells — are nothing new. What is new is that everybody’s waking up to the fact that there is a network behind all of these systems, and we need to think about networks as a common feature of all complex systems. But I don’t know if that’s the way you see it.

JAMES FOWLER: Well, as a social scientist, I’m always asking, “Why do people do stuff?” So for me, what is most amazing about networks is that they completely transform the way we think about data. For a really long time, we’ve thought about individuals as though they were islands — a Robinson Crusoe model of social science. Being able to integrate information — not just about people, but about theirrelationships — is something that’s completely new.

The rise of online social networks in the past few years has been very important in this respect. Now we can ask, “What’s happening in that whole complex set of relationships that we could never learn by looking at just each individual?”

ALB: Social networks have also given us a new cache of hard data so we’re no longer talking so abstractly about networks. One of the fundamental surprises, which certainly excites the physics community, is that we keep finding similar organizing principles across widely different systems. That is, if for a moment you forget that one node is a metabolite, the other is a gene, and the third is a person, the networks behind metabolism, genetics, and social systems are very much alike. And this has allowed people — social scientists like you, physicists like me, as well as biologists and economists — to talk together on equal terms.

JF: It’s really breaking down barriers. And I completely agree that it’s data driven, that we have this new information, especially about interactions between people and interactions at the cellular level, that has driven an interest in these methods. But the methods are now driving interest in the data. There’s a lot more interest, for example, in how to define the nodes and the relationships in, say, a set of college students in a dorm. So if we asked them, “Who are your friends?” we can now follow who they call by tracking their cellphone usage, or by tagging their phones with GPS to see who they physically spend time with.

Getting that kind of massive, passive data has now become a goal, because we have these network methods that you and your colleagues have developed.

Facebook in a crowd

JF: I’ve noticed something interesting on Facebook. I’ll have a cluster of friends who are not on Facebook and when one becomes my friend, all of a sudden — in a matter of days — they will all become friends with me, and all become friends with one another until the community is linked.

ALB: That’s right. And then it freezes until some other friends come along and connect another community to you. The phenomenon is not unique to Facebook; the web also evolves through bursts.

JF: Exactly. And in Facebook it’s not so easy for links to go away.

ALB: It’s a wonderful example of how our world has changed thanks to technology. We all have friends whom we’ve accumulated over 20, 30, 40 years, depending on our age. I moved from Transylvania to Hungary and from Hungary to the United States. In the past, most of my previous links were lost. Now they’re all on Facebook and the Hungarian equivalent, called iWiw. Suddenly, these social networking sites become a depository of our personal history. Some elementary school friends recently reconnected with me. People about whom I have to think hard, “Who are they?” Then, I remember, “Oh yes, he was in my fourth grade class.” Now he’s a friend. Because of technology we have stopped hemorrhaging links. And I think this is fundamentally changing how we behave on a daily basis.

JF: I agree. But if we move from five friends in real life to 500 on Facebook, it’s not the case that we are having a close, deep relationship with each of those 500 friends.

ALB: Sure.

JF: In fact, one of the intriguing things I’ve noticed about these online networks is that they have a property that’s different from realworld social networks. As you know, in the real world, popular people tend to be friends with popular people. But in these technological networks, as in metabolic networks, it’s just the opposite. The nodes with many, many links will tend to be linked to nodes with few links.

ALB: Right.

JF: It makes me wonder if the dynamics of online social networks are going to be reflective of realworld social networks. Because to a large extent, in your work and some of the work that I’ve done, we’re relying on the idea that what we see online is telling us something about the real world. But there’s a pretty fundamental difference.

ALB: Which brings up a good point: What do we mean when we say that all the “real-world” networks —  the technological, social, and metabolic ones — are similar to each other? They share a few fundamental organizing principles. One that has gotten lots of attention in the scientific community is the existence of the hubs. All of these extremely disparate networks, from the cell that has developed over 4 billion years to the World Wide Web with a 20-year history, have naturally developed these hubs. Somehow, networks always converge to the same underlying scale-free structure.

JF: This really takes us back to Darwin. Which for me, in the social sciences, is a little controversial. But I believe we’re going to find that natural selection is what causes hubs to emerge in all these different networks. You have natural selection operating in the cell. You have it operating on the evolution of the brain. And recently, Nicholas Christakis, Christopher Dawes, and I have found evidence that there’s a genetic basis for human social networks — that the number of people who name you as a friend is actually heritable, and about half of the variation in the number of friends can be explained due to variation in the genes.

ALB: So you mean my genes affect how many people would name me as a friend?

JF: Yes.

ALB: Can I get that gene?

JF: Some of this makes sense, right? Physically attractive people, people who communicate well, people who have assets, are probably going to be more attractive. But we were startled at how strong the genetic effect was. To me, what this really says is that human social networks have been operating under natural selection for a very long time — since we were walking around on the plains of the Serengeti in the Pleistocene. These forces are still with us today. So I really appreciate the effort to explain the variation between the hubs and the isolates in these physics models using a single underlying principle. But what this suggests to me is that it’s not necessarily inherent homogeneity or similarity that brings about some of this variation; it’s actually inherent variation.

There are things that make each of us, as human beings, unique — that give each of us a unique place in the social network. The fact that we’re finding this sort of genetic relationship makes me wonder if there’s actually a genetic purpose. That is, natural selection might have acted on us to make sure that we have a variety of people who are hubs and who aren’t hubs, that we have people within these dense networks, as well as people who act as bridges between groups.

ALB: Wow. I have never heard that one. It’s interesting, because the question of the role of natural selection came up very sharply when we first started to look at cellular networks, when we really didn’t know what to expect. When the data came out, in each case we saw the same scale-free structure, which forced us to say, “Why so?” And now the understanding is that it is because of growth — the fact that each network emerges through the gradual addition of new nodes. The growth process imposes such strong constraints on the network structure that all natural selection does is choose among the many possible scale-free networks. In the case of biological systems, we understand why the cell is scale free. What biologists have shown is that if the main mechanism by which you add new genes to the cell is by gene duplication — that is, you copy and recopy existing genes — then the only network that can emerge from that process is a scale-free network.

JF: So, where does it come from? I mean, if they’re all scale free, then that suggests that natural selection isn’t the cause.

ALB: Right. And actually, one of the important properties of scale-free networks is their robustness. That is, if you start randomly removing nodes from a scale-free network, the network will not collapse. Which initially led us, and many others, to think, “Well, then the reason why the cell is scale free, the reason why the hubs are there, is because of this robustness. It’s good for the cell, therefore natural selection has led the network to be scale free.” Yet nobody has managed to produce a scale-free network that is built on the robustness principle. If you try to optimize a network to be very robust to random node removal, to breakdowns, you’ll never find a scale-free one.

This suggests to us that the scale-free state of the cell, the existence of the hubs, is not because the cell has optimized itself to be resilient against mutations and other types of errors. It’s really coming from the way the cell — just like the internet — is created from the growth process, one node at a time. Since hubs happen to be a desirable property, there is no reason for natural selection to delete them.

The hyperconnection we are seeing creates for us a massive amount of choice, which, in turn, has an impact on our relationships. How many of us have been frustrated in a conversation with someone who’s picked up their phone to check a text or an email that has just arrived? Hyperconnection is the experience of having too much control, literally too many choices, in our interpersonal connections. If a computer is overloaded and running too many applications or programmes it will grind to a halt. Human hyperconnectivity has a similar effect as we become lost in a sea of connections. Many times our relationships fail due to our inability to be cautious about potentially unhealthy voyeuristic connections. This hyperconnected state makes relational focus a massive challenge.

One of the dangers of living in the hyperconnected world is our friend’s turn into our audience members and we turn into performers. Self-exposure is the currency of Facebook, twitter and other social networking sites. Although there are clear dangers of this hyperconnectedness, there also are some unique opportunities for us to share the gospel in new creative ways. An exciting project took place over Christmas that told the nativity in a 140 characters, called “the Natwivity”. The story of Joe, Mary, the Wisemen and the rest of the characters was an intriguing way of communicating the gospel to a new and varied audience. Social networking sites allow us to be connected in a way that has never seen before. We should be aware of the challenges but also aware of the fantastic new opportunities of communicating the good news of Jesus. But challenge is not supposed to be ignored. Jesus was the master of relationships. He seems to have this incredible ability to speak so clearly and simply and yet sometimes in these incomprehensible riddles. A clear trait of Jesus’ ministry was His complete understanding of connection. We see him speak honestly into the lives of all he met and make these immediate, life-transforming connections in a short space of time. He pulled and drew people in rather than pushing them away. A great example of His holistic understanding of relationships can be seen in His interaction with the woman at the well. This interaction sees him speak powerfully into her life and build a lasting connection in a short period of time. A challenge that Jesus’ life has given us is that connections with people are paramount to living a successful Christian life. Hyperconnection allows us to have connections with large amounts of people but also allows for us to be less committed to genuine connections. Jesus challenges us to care about the quality of our connection and not about quantity.

A college student, when I asked her how she was, responded by saying “check my Facebook status”. We live in a ‘hyperconnected’ world, a world in which many different means of communication are used; more specifically social networking sites. You are never more than one click or tap away from millions of people all over the globe. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Emails or some other form of connectedness, we are bombarded with connections. We are famous in our own world. We want people to ‘like’ our statuses, retweet our tweets and reply to our emails, in a way that has never been seen before. With the rise in smart phones our level of connectedness is only going to increase. We live in a ‘switched on’ ethos and rarely take ourselves offline and never consider the impact of our hyperconnected society on our lives. Facebook gives us a stage, a microphone and a spotlight to perform to an invisible audience. It allows us to live out our teenage desires where the world is watching and listening to our life and beliefs. Cyberspace allows us to have a platform to voice our life to our followers; those who will listen. The effect of this hyperconnected culture is to transform our relationships from friendships to audience members to whom we perform.

Everyone is searching for an authentic connection. In connection we find safety and comfort. Most people aretrying to find a nurturing space that allows us to develop as a whole person; maturing inwardly even as we develop outwardly. Henri Nouwen once said “Probably no word better summa

rizes the suffering of our time than the word ‘homeless.’ It reveals one of our deepest and most painful conditions; the condition of not having a sense of belonging, of not having a place where we can feel safe, cared for, protected, and loved.” Nouwen describes a

systemic problem within our hyperconnected culture, a problem we see littered throughout the history of time. We are all looking for a place to call home, a place where we can be ourselves, with people who love and care for us. When we look for a best friend, we go looking for home. When we look for a partner, we go looking for home. We see clearly in Genesis the emergence of the human need for genuine connections when God says “It is not good for man to be alone”. The fullness of humanity can only be expressed through relationship. We are not made to be alone: we are creatures of relationship.

During the past 2 years Facebook has exploded. During the first quarter of 2009 it had 5 million followers joining every week. By the end of 2009 Mark Zuckerberg sent a message to all users informing them that there were now over 350 million people using Facebook, worldwide. In a short period of time (6 years) a massive percentage of the world has been harmonized on the same web based platform. What gravity has enough pull to bring the world together under the banner of Facebook? The human need for Home. We all require authentic connections and a place where we can be liked for who we are. A place we share common interests, interact with like-minded people; a place where we can get the adulation that we all so crave.

I have been re-watching the video again and am really struck by the raging debate that still continues about Virtual Community. We are a society that is moving into a new generation that will have lived throughout with the Social Networking Era. They will have been defined by it. There friendship will revolve around it. What challenge’s does this leave us with?

Some Good Links that talk more about this…

Out of UR

Flowerdust

JR Woodward

Five minutes goes by and I get out my Iphone, open up my Facebook app and check if I have any new wall posts, hoping that someone has sent me a message or ‘liked’ my status. What did I do before Facebook? How did I stay in contact with my friends before I had them all at the click of a mouse or the tap of the keyboard?

Have you ever missed an event or not turned up to something because it wasn’t on Facebook. I even rely on Facebook to tell me when my families’ birthdays are. Social networking sites like Facebook have changed the way we live our lives. This has great implications for the church.

The pace and way of life is increasingly shaped by the technology we create and utilize. The way we communicate is often the basis for relationships, community and culture. New, powerful ways of communicating affect and transform the way we interact with each other in our schools, colleges and places of work. The internet and social networking sites, like Facebook, have a big potential to allow Christians to share our faith in new relevant way. They also have their dangers.

We can sometimes become so reliant on Facebook that we miss out on building relationships in person. Many times I get home from seeing my mates only to realize I’d forgotten how much I love spending time with them face to face. Nothing beats it.  While Facebook is a powerful tool, it doesn’t replace the quality time that comes from hanging out with your mates and doing what you love best together.

We only need to look at the bible to see that words are powerful used in the right way, at a distance or face to face. Facebook gives us the ability to be involved in many lives across many worlds. What we do with this technology will shape the future of our relationships with one another and the way we interact with God. Your status, your wall posts and your comments demonstrate who you are and what you believe in. What have you posted in the last few weeks? What does say about your life and your world? What does it say about your bond with God?

If we use Facebook as a way of challenging people’s attitude towards God then it can be a powerful tool. If we use it as replacement for relationship it becomes a poor imitation of friendship.