Networking the polymonsterwotsitthingy

[fluffymark]

This may be a little long. I don't know where I'm going in this post yet, but I'll see where I end up. A few ideas of mine are merging with a few threads from here and there. This has given birth to a new idea to chase, and I've got far too much time on my hands today so I'm going to see how far I get before it doesn't make any more sense. Still with me? Then lets start.

How connected are my friends? Through whom did I meet all of you? I've been pondering this (see, I've got way too much time). Following a recent post of kmazzy's about how she was introduced to most of her friends, I was inspired to write my own list. First I attempted on the computer, but there were too many names and it got confusing so I attempted to put it all together on paper first. With a pencil. And lots of rubbing out and scribbling and crossing out and reassembling and trying to alter the topology of the paper to get everyone to fit. After several attempts, with some guesswork in some places where I've forgotten, there emerged the following diagram of much doom and scariness:

*boggle* I hope thats not too confusing. The above shows through whom I first got to know most of you - those connected directly to me I met without anyone being strongly involved in how we met or got to know you - otherwise you're linked off the person though whom I first met you or really got to know you. Brackets show those without a LJ who I've added because they are important in linkages. As I suspected, mirabehn and doseybat are key to introducing me to many people, but its not that simple, is it? It's far more complicated than that, much more than thought it would be (especially compared to kmazzy's list). Eeeep. The curious thing is, many of those people, even those far separated on my diagram, are linked to each other. I think I'd need a multidimensional piece of paper to draw all of those, so I've not even tried. But have a look - find yourself and see who else you know on the diagram - see how far away some of them are. The interconnectedness is awesome. And downright scary.

This morning, I'd found that doseybat had pointed me to a very interesting post about small world syndrome by rho. All the more curious because I've never met her at all, but the name is familiar, she knows some of my friends, and she describes in highly identifiable terms the meta-group of people I know all too well. Which pretty much shows how insidious this group is already. I've known about this meta-group for many years, but I can't think of a good name for it. The polymonsterthingywotsit with tentacles in everyone. Yes, that one.

This goes far beyond the usual small world connectivity of Milgram's well known "6 Degrees of Separation" back in 1967. I'm told this works because of a few nodes with very high connectiveness that hold the whole thing together. That is the main quality of a Scale Free Network - the Internet itself is a good example, and are many social groups, and there are many others - even Heresy is claimed to be a scale free network. But this monster group doesn't behave like that at all. Looking at my above diagram, I can't point at anyone and say they're the highly connected one that holds the group together. Even if theres a major tragedy and the lovely mirabehn and doseybat get abducted by aliens, which would sadden me greatly, I wouldn't actually lose connectivity with the rest. The meta-group is not a scale free network. It's far more connected than that. And it doesn't have to be scale-free. Small-worldedness is not a property limited to scale-free networks. Randomly connected networks exhibit the property well. A very enlightening website here provides a good explanation of the Watts-Strogatz model, showing that short path length can even be obtained even with large clustering. And the meta-group path length is very short - 2 or 3 links at most. This may be a good model for this meta-group - but lets see.

The meta-group is a hybridization of many smaller identifiable sub-groups, each with high connectivity individually. I'm always stunned to find that everyone I know from Oxford seems to know everyone else there (it is true - you do know all each other). Similarly with Cambridge. Then theres the goths, the geeks, the role-players, the bisexuals, etc etc. It just so happens that these groups, for whatever reason, have a high degree of correlation and overlap with each other, and so piling all the groups on top of each other, this enhances the connectivity by many orders of magnitude. The whole thing feeds back on itself and gets even stronger and the tentacles reach out further. Even to those of us on the inside it looks like one big conspiracy. The reason it's so strongly connected has a lot to do with the Internet. Although the Internet itself is scale-free, this doesn't stop communities forming online that aren't scale-free. The usual model of social networks assumes a dynamic construction via preferential attachment - people will seek out the already well-connected popular people, which leads to a few nodes being very highly connected. Somehow this model is flawed here - looking at my diagram above at how my own network dynamically grew, there is no sign of preferential attachment, and every sign that people even not close to me are crucial links. I'd propose that the internet allows one to link to lots of nodes and know lots of people, and not just the highly connected nodes, but except for some rare exceptions, the vast majority of people I know I met them in person first and not online. So that can't be right. But the meta-group is still there. I don't know how big it is, and I suspect it would be impossible to map precisely because it is so interconnected. And it can't be the only one - this phenomena must exist elsewhere? I'm not just talking single large connected groups here (for example Christians, or Jews) - I'm thinking meta-groups where several groups overlap.

Thoughts, ideas? Have I completely lost the plot? Or is it all just a conspiracy just to confuse me? Have I just got too much time to think about silly things like this?

Comments

[taimatsu]

How come davefish? Was it he who introduced us at Whitby? I thought it was more online in general stuff :)

I'm intrigued that you have inskauldrak and telpher and me on your list but not quisalan. I must have a party sometime.

[fluffymark]

You were a tricky one to place - Yes, I'd briefly chatted to you in LJ comments before meeting you as you seemed to have many friends in common with me (one of the surefire symptoms of the meta-group in action), but it was definately davefish who introduced us to each other at Whitby, so thats how I placed you on my diagram.

PLUS I have met quisalan (and rahter fancied her at the time...), she once stayed overnight at my place a couple of years back, we just never added each other on LJ.

[zeke-hubris.livejournal.com]

That is fascinating. I may have to have a go at ding my own later. The thing that leaps out at me from it is that the people who could arguably be classed as 'highly connected' from how well known they are online (Diva and Jezebel spring to mind) are lurking at the edges of your diagram.

Did I really meet you through Sheridan? I had a feeling it was through either Avalon or Verity.

[fluffymark]

My bad. Yes, it was Verity, wasn't it? Somehow I'd gotten the idea that sheridan had introduced us at some picnic or other, but Verity got there first, didn't she? Now I feel silly. I doubt your the only one i've gotten wrong - some of the others are much more guesswork than that...

Yes, reddragdiva and jezebel_z's locations on my diagram shocked me - I know highly-connected people but they're right out there on the edge where the highly-connectedness doesn't count for me. It doesn't matter that thay know lots of people - the meta-group is still there even if they didn't.

[reddragdiva]

The highly-connected people tend to seek each other out (actively or passively) because it's a good way to enhance one's personal network.

I'd also point out that the UK Netgoth network links closely to the network you're talking about, but is actually almost entirely separate in its actual social operations.

[rainbowskye.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if I met you via Sheridan too. You'll have to remind me cos I can't remember!!

[ixwin.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I might try doing a diagram like that for myself.

Despite having been at Oxford, I'm not really networked with it.

[fluffymark]

Go ahead - actually I'd be *very* interested to see yours (and other peoples) diagrams - it will just show me the full extent of the interconnectedness.

You may be right that you're the exception to the oxford networking rule. Odd. But you're still only a couple of links away, even if theres not a direct link. :)

[the-mendicant.livejournal.com]

fascinating, but not comprehensive - I'm not on it, or Robin, or Graham who I met you through at the Beer Festival

[fluffymark]

Look closer - I didn't miss you off - on the left hand side, probably written a little too small to be wholly legible, you'll find razornet and yourself. I've never knowingly properly met Robin, which is why he isn't on it.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

I think I know people in all those groups. I've never met mirabehn, but I know phlebas (and so does valkyriekaren, through the same means), for example.

Oh, looking again it's not quite that bad - there are a couple of people with no connections that I've met (although I'm surprised that zotz is one of them, as I'd thought you met him at a party of valkyriekaren's and mine.) and a couple of bigger groups too.

[fluffymark]

Yes, I thought you would know a lot. I suspect yourself and mirabehn have many friends in common, despite you having never met (i think this has to be rectified!). And I'd not even considered the manifestation of the Snowplains posse until this morning - rho, who inspired half this idea, herself appears to be a Snowplainer (or whatever the word is........er..penguin?).

I have met zotz - thats why he's on the diagram - I think I just met him at the Calling rahter than via anyone in particular so thats why he's linked to me directly. People who i've no connection with are not on the diagram at all. I had hoped to add in more people who I know, but who are not on my LJ friends list (such as elise), as there must be several dozen of those, and that'd make the connections even more scary, but other than a few essential people I had to include for linking purposes, I ran out of space on my bit of paper. Maybe I should get a large bit of A0 and work out the extended version. Eeep.

[lnr]

It's kind of strange seeing how you know some of the same people through entirely different routes.

[fluffymark]

Yep - strange isn't it? It's this symptom that inspired my idea to investigate this in the first place, to see how widespread this phenomenon is.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

It would appear from ixwin's diagram that you are yourself a highly connected node, which might explain why you can't spot the highly connected nodes.

[fluffymark]

Node-blindness? Hmmmm. I think you've spotted something important there. It'd be interesting to compare the diagrams of people who are supposed to be highly connected to those that aren't, and see how much the difference really is.

[poggs.livejournal.com]

GraphViz may be a useful tool to formally represent this.

Hm, post-pizza activity... :D

[fluffymark]

oooooh. Yes. That looks like it may work. Thank you. :)

Oh and hello! I don't believe I know you...how did you find this? *curious*

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Interesting small-world-syndrome thingy: zotz goes out with zoo_music_girl, who I met at nickys's New Year party this year. So we have a kind of pentagon going there, with no obvious connections across the pentagon...

[fluffymark]

Some sort of Edinburgh link making a Pentagon. oooooh. It would chop a corner off if I connected to zoo_music_girl who I've met on many occasions but I don't think I've ever had a real conversation with.

[fluffymark]

Yep - I recall your name vaguely from my schooldays, but I don't think we ever properly met there. It'd be weird to have a school link in that lot, really, wouldn't it?

[incy.livejournal.com]

that si very impressive

[fluffymark]

I suddenly noticed I made a mistake by linking coven via you - Verity (sitting on the opposite side of the diagram)introduced me to her completely independently, and I was pleasantly surprised when later I found that you and her were a couple.

[kmazzy.livejournal.com]

now i want to do mine like that. it would make so much more sense. but i am too lazy for in involves scanning.

[fluffymark]

Scanning is fun. or that could depend on what you're scanning. It can be naughty.

Re: Small world :)

[fluffymark]

Oh yes - I'm aware of your working with Joe. Except he's abandoning us both and sodding off to Nottingham next month.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

I have two thoughts.

Firstly, hello I don't have you on my friends list argh oversight.

Secondly, I just remembered I met you after you left ?honey on my door-handle... :-)

[fluffymark]

Hello Clare and Welcome! Don't worry about the oversight - I know there are probably at least a hundred people I know in real life who have LJs that I've not friended, not becasue I don't want to, but I'd prefer not to hunt around the depths of LJ trying to find them all. I'll add them one by one as I stumble across them - like now. :) :)

Yes, I still have a vivid recollection of the honey-smearing incident. :) *nostalgia* Assassins led to some very strange ways of meeting people. I guess that means you count as a direct link from me, as nobody else was particularly involved.

[erming.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm, most of mine would be pre existing links from mono.

most of the others link from you or Catt.

BTW any clues as to what I sent Catt, as I really can't remember sending her a pressie. So I'm guessing theres a phantom Ian in her life.

[fluffymark]

I'm sure mono counts as an entire sub-group on its own. Eeeep.

Oh bother - I must have misremembered who gave her the presents - Someone gave me presents for snow_leopard when I arrived at the Oakdale Arms beer festival, only there was no card or name so I later forgot who. but just assumed it had to be you, as there was only you and damerell there when I arrived. Now I think about it, it could have been emarkienna, who turned up just after me. Oooooh. It probably was, wasn't it? *embarassed*

[squirmelia.livejournal.com]

I've been looking at my friends list, and tried to remember where I met people, but it seemed that most of the time it wasn't a case of linking from existing people, but from other groups. That makes my (slightly out of date) MindMap (http://ljmindmap.com/h.aspx?n=squirmelia) fairly easy to decipher.

Mono: Mainly in blue and mainly on the right.
Douglas Coupland mailing list: Mainly in yellow and in the middle.
Barbelith: Mainly in pink and in the middle under the yellow group.
Fidonet: Mainly in green and blue to the left of the pink.
Nanowrimo: Mainly in orangey-yellow to the right of the blue.

The more interesting links are the people that fall into more than one group, or are in one of those groups but are not linked to the majority of people in that group. Also, people I know from Southampton are quite spread around the map.

Maybe I should just draw a diagram of the people that are not part of those groups, or put squares around them or something, hmmm.

[kathrid.livejournal.com]

I am most amused by how spread out people I know are. For instance I would have expected one of my local group to have introduced neonchameleon as we're ones who know him IRL. But no, he's been brought in by a link of two people at least one of which I've never heard of.

Also, I've met davefish at Intrusion from time to time, but didn't know he had an LJ, so that's another random connection between me and other branches of the fluffymark friends tree.

It is all rather

[(Anonymous)]

weird. It gets even odder once you start putting the other links between people, although you might need to represent that in three dimensions. What with Joe working with this guy called Cybermuppet and having been to school with David Damerell, there must be countless other similar connections on there.

I reckon you could make a friends mobile with wire, coloured string and lots of labelled corks.

We have lots of corks if you want them.

Penny (feeling a bit like Janet Ellis)

Re: It is all rather

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Joe Marshall's parents are friends of mine; that's the original connection there.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

Two thoughts occur to me. Firstly, because you map connections only for introductions, rather than for friends, is the shape not rather skewed by people giving parties? I mean to say that Elly invited lots of people to Scotland and they all met one another, so Elly has introduced lots of people, but it doesn't necessarily follow that she knows lots of people (although she probably does, so it's not the best example). It is possible to be very good at introducing people to one another by giving lots of parties or otherwise and that isn't quite how I would naturally interpret "highly connected".

Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, the obvious thing which all these people have in common is that they are all LiveJournal users. I am reminded of an article in the Guardian which reported that schoolchildren divided into those who used texts and those who did not with little communication between the two groups. In a way this is unsurprising, because if some one refuses to use my preferred means of communication, then I am unlikely to communicate with them. It is not even an active choice to reject them; it is just easier to communicate with some one else.

Take the case of elise (to pick a completely random example). I met libellum at LSM, ghoti when she posted on christian_cambs asking for a lift to Walsingham and snow_leopard at your house. Those are all reasonably independent ways of meeting people, so it is prima facie surprising that all those people told me about elise, and it is clear from the way elise introduced herself to me that something similar had been happening in reverse. So it seems in some sense that E and I ought to have known each other. Was it perhaps foreshadowing on the part of the divine author, that, intending to introduce a new character to my life, he had to make lots of references to her in advance to heighten the tension? I remember a similar thing happening before I first went to Mirfield, but I doubt really that the divine author is quite so melodramatic as that, and he is probably also less Robert-focussed. Now, of course we know that all the people I have mentioned are goths, but that doesn't really count, because I didn't meet any of them through their gothiness.

What certainly is true is that I wouldn't be communicating with any of them if they weren't on LJ. ghoti I actually met through LJ. I remember after first meeting libellum she said, as I was leaving, "See you on LJ". If it weren't for that form of communication, since she stopped going to LSM after that, we probably would never have spoken again, and similarly for snow_leopard. It is increasing the case that I find myself at parties consisting entirely of LJ users, and statistically, that's very unlikely to happen because only about 1 out of 600 UK residents has one. Moreover, people I meet for the first time are far more likely than one would expect to be LJ users.

Continued...

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

...continued from previous comment.

I propose that what is going on is something like this: Of the people I meet, I am far more likely to remain in contact with those who are on LJ than those who are not, not necessarily because the latter are objectionable, but just because it is hard work to continue contact. Moreover, the other people I know are also doing the same thing, so that people I know (who are probably users) introduce me to people they know (who are probably also users) and so a really quite small set of people come to make up the entire social universe. There is also quite a lot of pressure on non-users who are part of that social universe to join LJ, or they risk falling out of the loop. Given that the social universe has been shrunk in this way, it is much less surprising that it is so highly connected.

However, there is something slightly more to it than that, because there is a hard to define sense in which the people I know are people like me. So there is, I suppose, an LJ social universe which is not just a miniature version of the whole social universe, but set off slightly to the side. An obvious example would be that it is a culture far more inclined towards BDSM than mainstream culture. (Possibly we are just more open about it, but I doubt it.) Another example would be that many of us have depressive tendencies. In both these cases a remark might seem entirely unremarkable on LJ whereas it would be some how shocking in wider society, hence my occasional feeling when reading the Guardian or talking to my mother that I am dealing with people who live in an entirely different world.

So, I am not quite sure what I am actually saying, but I think it is that there is a large group of people with certain broad personality traits in common, who like other people with similar personality traits, who find LJ a conducive social medium, who tend to exclude non-users (or, at least, turn them into users), and who have a set of mores slightly askew from the mores of wider society.

I may well be trying to put more weight on LJ than it can actually bear, and I am not at all sure how this relates to your post, but I do suspect that something a bit like that is going on.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

To try to clarify slightly, I am actually saying three things. Firstly, LJ users have a preference for communication with other LJ users, so the set of all users tends to form a clique. Secondly, people like people who are in some broad sense like themselves and "being like" is an equivalence relation so people like us (for any value of "us") tend to form a clique. This isn't related to anything so precise as being a goth, bisexual, geek or whatever, but to a vaguer sense of fellow-feeling, which may nevertheless overlap with these identities. Thirdly, these two cliques, in our particular case, overlap significantly, so that people like us tend to be on LJ and vice versa.