Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Blog Assignment: How Social Network Analyses can help people to find out who are their most important connections?


Wednesday, July 23, 2014; I have 389 contacts on my cell phone, 436 connections on LinkedIn, 968 connections on Facebook, 188 friends on Whatsapp, and 51 friends on Snapchat. I don’t have either Instragram or Twitter. I have two e-mails account, three accounts, actually, considering Hult e-mail (that I use only for school). I think I have Orkut but I don’t remember the password. Honestly, I am not sure if I deleted my Orkut account. By the way, I heard that Google is going to shut down Orkut in September. Anyway, I think that I am connected with 99% of my friends by one of these technologies. I can remember only one person that does not have any of these connections I mentioned before: my grandmother – she is almost 90 years old.

From all the connections I mentioned before, I don’t think I have been really connected with half of them in the last couple of years. Sometimes I get surprised with some people that posted happy birthday on my Facebook timeline and I don’t even remember that we were friends on Facebook.

Here is the challenge: how social network analyses can help people to find out who are their most important connections?

I think the best way to address this challenge is to present some examples based on my personal profile and in different situations.



As we can see, the Social Network Analyses is an essential tool to find out who our really important connections are. It is certain that it is not possible or not easy to connect with all of our friends (if I had to send a message for one different Facebook friend each day, it would take me more than three years to talk with all of them) but it is important to know who can help you in different situations. We will always have different important connections to different situations. In my opinion, a luck person is the one that has a couple of friends present in all these situations.


Now I finish it with a question for you: Are you an important connection for someone?

1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

I agree that we are over-connected. You say that SNA is an "essential tool" but how would you use it to sort your friends? What measures would be useful? Maybe you'd want to wind up with 160--the so-called "Dunbar's number" which is the maximum number of real social relationships someone can handle, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar (look him up.)