Drowning in social networking

Who are all these people subscribing me or following me or whatever? I don’t know them and they don’t know me. The most they can possibly know about me is from my picture, profile and a quick look at the latest stuff I posted or tweeted or the videos on youtube that I make. None of those followers know what kind of a person I really am, nobody knows anything much about me unless you’re a long-term friend. However we all need to expand our connections, but the vast majority of those we connect to will turn out to be passively useless. Of course, you have no idea which ones those are, because someone connected to you may seem to be contributing nothing but they in turn may connect to someone else who connects to someone else, who, well, you get the idea. Distant and weak links are often valuable. Not all the time, but it happens.

The point is, these social networks are actually directed graphs, even though it doesn’t seem like it. There are people who tweet out or post out. There are people who don’t, or hardly ever, or when they do it’s about something mundane in their life such as their cat looking cute again. There are people who read these messages and people who ignore most of them. When you have a lot of followers and in turn you follow a lot, you can’t possibly spend all day reading it all, you’d get nothing done. Some people produce content on the social networks, some people consume content, some redirect, retweet or repost and act as hubs within their own networks. Some even act as circuses linking the hubs that they pay attention to, at the expense of discrete islands of nodes.

Therefore some information is going out from many nodes, some information is coming in to many nodes, and not all nodes balance this equally. The network value of a node is related to how actively it will process from input to output usefully to others (either reading it, or retweeting it, etc). If it does nothing, or just occasionally posts about the cat, it’s effectively just noise. However, as I stated, you can’t just remove all the first degree connections that seem useless, they may be connected further away to someone more useful —you simply never know.

A lot of this chasing followers in the hope of a sudden viral success of whatever it is we’re all about, reminds me of something. It reminds me of the last years of the 20th century when everyone was swapping banner ads on their web rings. It’s not actual productive work. Yes, it gets the word out there and an amount of that kind of promotion is a good ingredient, but it can’t take your whole day, day after day. If everyone did that, nothing would get made, grown, produced or fixed. My advice therefore is to concentrate far more on what it is that you produce that is of value, and less so on publicising it, otherwise you’ll get nearly nothing done in life. Turn your back, get on with whatever it is you actually do and make some more of it. Be productive. You can market it afterwards. Unless, that is, your whole productive output is structured only around social media “marketing”, in which case you’re effectively useless. But that can’t be the case, I’m sure you can actually do something that people are interested in experiencing.

What is a network? Fitness, Value, Tournaments

If you search for fitness models on the Internet you’ll find an impressive range of pretty young things who don’t stray far from a gym. They’re certainly nice people to look at, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. A fitness model from the network context is a way of describing how it grew to where it is now, or how it may have failed to grow, or what it may be likely to do next. The assumption is that the nodes in the network are competitive and will seek an increase in the degree of their connections at the expense of other nodes degree connection. The Bianconi + Barabási model expresses this mathematically, which means that I won’t go into it here right now. Or anywhere. Ever.

I would suggest, however, a further parameter to this model. The existing facet of fitness could be viewed as intrinsic but let’s add another parameter that I might call ‘value’, which could be seen as an extrinsic dimension. If a node offers ‘value’ then it is given ‘fitness’ in terms of affordability of degree connections. Either way, the Barabási-Albert model of preferential attachment does give us an insight into why we have scale-free networks that can ramp up a given dimension into the stratosphere, for example when a meme goes ‘viral’ in popularity.

We are within a network of other people, perhaps in a family or friends context, and perhaps in a business context, with all of our connections. Therefore we are a vertex, surrounded by edges connected to other vertices. As a node, then, how do we consider and evaluate our ‘fitness’ within a network? And if we follow my modification of the above model and consider that there is another complementary parameter of ‘value’, how do we evaluate our value? Do you proffer value? Does your value afford the rewarding of network fitness? Does your network fitness promote visibility and popularity to attract more connectivity? Is your network fitness greedy from a competitive point of view, or generous from a collaborative point of view?

It’s my opinion that the Barabási-Albert model or the later refined Bianconi / Barabási model is missing an ingredient, because as it stands, it recognises fitness as a greedy action of competition success. However, people don’t necessarily work that way, or at least, not for very long (especially if we add the complication of the breadcrumb-path of reputation as a persistence aspect, etc. but we shouldn’t complicate it here, let’s keep it simple. Oops, too late). People in business leverage a blend of competition and collaboration — too much of one or the other and it’s not a good business success. The models require an extra thing, and I suggest that this is an outward-pushing ‘value’ aspect, that complements the inward-grabbing ‘fitness’ aspect. Being rewarded for offering value is akin to collaboration and is rewarded by fitness affordance which is of course akin to competition according to the BA and BB models above.

One more thing. The Tournament in graph theory is a directed graph, which forms the directivity progressively along a duration. In other words, there is a predetermined topology of the network but the directivity is not laid down yet. It gets laid down connection by connection. The outcome of this is that it describes a dominance model, and relates to social choice theory. The reason that people make choices is interesting, but the reasons that people within an influencing and influenceable group make their choices is even more interesting. With great power comes great scriptwriting and marketing, or something like that, and the responsibility of being a big noise in a highly connected network is possibly more paramount than many people realise. I suppose the only advice I can give is to be a valuable person for the sake of your reputation, because the reputation forms a persistent record. Whether that means being nice, or whether that means you can get away with being a bastard, that’s up to you — it’s your value, your fitness, your transactional reputation imprint.