Link structures, information flow, and social processes

In the ongoing movement toward socially-produced information resources, we are increasingly able to look through the content being created and see the individuals, incentives, and larger social processes at work. Designing and working with large-scale participatory social computing applications requires that we think not just about technological issues, but also about fundamental principles of human social interaction. Through the digital traces that these applications generate, we can begin to quantify and reason about such principles at unprecedented levels of scale and resolution.

In this talk, we consider a crucial type of social process in this setting - the mechanisms by which information flows through groups of people engaged in sharing and synthesizing knowledge. As information, ideas, opinions, and beliefs spread through an underlying social network, their dynamics resemble that of an epidemic, moving "contagiously" from person to person. But social contagion is different from biological contagion in many respects; understanding the analogies and contrasts between these two kinds of processes leads us to consider the rich temporal characteristics of information flow within a network and the complex decision rules by which people choose to act on new information. The result is a richer picture of the communities that create knowledge and its interlinkages, and of the resources that ultimately arise from these processes.