Homophily in MySpace
01 Feb 2009-Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd)-Vol. 60, Iss: 2, pp 219-231
TL;DR: For instance, the authors reported an exploratory study of the similarity between the reported attributes of pairs of active MySpace Friends based upon a systematic sample of 2,567 members joining on June 18, 2007 and Friends who commented on their profile.
Abstract: Social network sites like MySpace are increasingly important environments for expressing and maintaining interpersonal connections, but does online communication exacerbate or ameliorate the known tendency for offline friendships to form between similar people (homophily)q This article reports an exploratory study of the similarity between the reported attributes of pairs of active MySpace Friends based upon a systematic sample of 2,567 members joining on June 18, 2007 and Friends who commented on their profile. The results showed no evidence of gender homophily but significant evidence of homophily for ethnicity, religion, age, country, marital status, attitude towards children, sexual orientation, and reason for joining MySpace. There were also some imbalances: women and the young were disproportionately commenters, and commenters tended to have more Friends than commentees. Overall, it seems that although traditional sources of homophily are thriving in MySpace networks of active public connections, gender homophily has completely disappeared. Finally, the method used has wide potential for investigating and partially tracking homophily in society, providing early warning of socially divisive trends. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptual model that identifies tie strength, homophily, trust, normative and informational interpersonal influence as an important antecedent to eWOM behavior in SNSs was developed and tested.
Abstract: As more and more marketers incorporate social media as an integral part of the promotional mix, rigorous investigation of the determinants that impact consumers’ engagement in eWOM via social networks is becoming critical. Given the social and communal characteristics of social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, this study examines how social relationship factors relate to eWOM transmitted via online social websites. Specifically, a conceptual model that identifies tie strength, homophily, trust, normative and informational interpersonal influence as an important antecedent to eWOM behaviour in SNSs was developed and tested. The results confirm that tie strength, trust, normative and informational influence are positively associated with users’ overall eWOM behaviour, whereas a negative relationship was found with regard to homophily. This study suggests that product-focused eWOM in SNSs is a unique phenomenon with important social implications. The implications for research...
1,693 citations
Cites background from "Homophily in MySpace"
...Among the various types of social media, SNSs have received mounting attention from researchers, educators, practitioners and policy makers (boyd & Ellison 2008; Ellison et al. 2007; Thelwall 2008, 2009; Valenzuela et al. 2009)....
[...]
Proceedings Article•
01 Jun 2013TL;DR: A critical review of the NLP community's response to the landscape of bad language is offered, and a quantitative analysis of the lexical diversity of social media text, and its relationship to other corpora is presented.
Abstract: The rise of social media has brought computational linguistics in ever-closer contact with bad language: text that defies our expectations about vocabulary, spelling, and syntax. This paper surveys the landscape of bad language, and offers a critical review of the NLP community’s response, which has largely followed two paths: normalization and domain adaptation. Each approach is evaluated in the context of theoretical and empirical work on computer-mediated communication. In addition, the paper presents a quantitative analysis of the lexical diversity of social media text, and its relationship to other corpora.
383 citations
Cites background from "Homophily in MySpace"
...The fact many such neologisms are closely circumscribed in geography and demographics may reflect diffusion through social networks that are assortative on exactly these dimensions (Backstrom et al., 2010; Thelwall, 2009)....
[...]
TL;DR: The proposed framework, SocioDim, first extracts social dimensions based on the network structure to accurately capture prominent interaction patterns between actors, then learns a discriminative classifier to select relevant social dimensions.
Abstract: Social media has reshaped the way in which people interact with each other. The rapid development of participatory web and social networking sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, also brings about many data mining opportunities and novel challenges. In particular, we focus on classification tasks with user interaction information in a social network. Networks in social media are heterogeneous, consisting of various relations. Since the relation-type information may not be available in social media, most existing approaches treat these inhomogeneous connections homogeneously, leading to an unsatisfactory classification performance. In order to handle the network heterogeneity, we propose the concept of social dimension to represent actors' latent affiliations, and develop a classification framework based on that. The proposed framework, SocioDim, first extracts social dimensions based on the network structure to accurately capture prominent interaction patterns between actors, then learns a discriminative classifier to select relevant social dimensions. SocioDim, by differentiating different types of network connections, outperforms existing representative methods of classification in social media, and offers a simple yet effective approach to integrating two types of seemingly orthogonal information: the network of actors and their attributes.
361 citations
Proceedings Article•
20 May 2012TL;DR: This paper evaluates the inference accuracy gained by augmenting the user features with features derived from the Twitter profiles and postings of her friends, and considers three attributes which have varying degrees of assortativity: gender, age, and political affiliation.
Abstract: In this paper, we extend existing work on latent attribute inference by leveraging the principle of homophily: we evaluate the inference accuracy gained by augmenting the user features with features derived from the Twitter profiles and postings of her friends. We consider three attributes which have varying degrees of assortativity: gender, age, and political affiliation. Our approach yields a significant and robust increase in accuracy for both age and political affiliation, indicating that our approach boosts performance for attributes with moderate to high assortativity. Furthermore, different neighborhood subsets yielded optimal performance for different attributes, suggesting that different subsamples of the user's neighborhood characterize different aspects of the user herself. Finally, inferences using only the features of a user's neighbors outperformed those based on the user's features alone. This suggests that the neighborhood context alone carries substantial information about the user.
349 citations
Cites background from "Homophily in MySpace"
...Thelwall 2009)....
[...]
...These three attributes exhibit different degrees of assortativity, allowing us to evaluate how assortativity affects the performance of our method (Thelwall 2009; Conover et al. 2011b)....
[...]
...Gender has been reported to have minimal assortativity both in the physical and online social networks (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook ; Thelwall 2009)....
[...]
TL;DR: This paper studied the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users and found that social network homophily is correlated with the use of same-gender language markers.
Abstract: We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we argue for a more nuanced approach. By clustering Twitter users, we find a natural decomposition of the dataset into various styles and topical interests. Many clusters have strong gender orientations, but their use of linguistic resources sometimes directly conflicts with the population-level language statistics. We view these clusters as a more accurate reflection of the multifaceted nature of gendered language styles. Previous corpus-based work has also had little to say about individuals whose linguistic styles defy population-level gender patterns. To identify such individuals, we train a statistical classifier, and measure the classifier confidence for each individual in the dataset. Examining individuals whose language does not match the classifier's model for their gender, we find that they have social networks that include significantly fewer same-gender social connections and that, in general, social network homophily is correlated with the use of same-gender language markers. Pairing computational methods and social theory thus offers a new perspective on how gender emerges as individuals position themselves relative to audiences, topics, and mainstream gender norms.
299 citations
References
More filters
TL;DR: The homophily principle as mentioned in this paper states that similarity breeds connection, and that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics.
Abstract: Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...
15,738 citations
TL;DR: This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright and which are likely to be copyrighted.
Abstract: Social network sites SNSs are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research
14,912 citations
TL;DR: Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.
Abstract: This study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one’s ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N = 286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.
9,001 citations
TL;DR: This work analyzed a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations and attributes.
Abstract: Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles. We analyzed a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations and attributes. We found that network evolution is dominated by a combination of effects arising from network topology itself and the organizational structure in which the network is embedded. In the absence of global perturbations, average network properties appear to approach an equilibrium state, whereas individual properties are unstable.
1,713 citations
TL;DR: While younger teenagers relish the opportunities to recreate continuously a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity, older teenagers favour a plain aesthetic that foregrounds their links to others, thus expressing a notion of identity lived through authentic relationships.
Abstract: The explosion in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster is widely regarded as an exciting opportunity, especially for youth.Yet the public response tends to be one of puzzled dismay regarding a generation that, supposedly, has many friends but little sense of privacy and a narcissistic fascination with self-display. This article explores teenagers' practices of social networking in order to uncover the subtle connections between online opportunity and risk. While younger teenagers relish the opportunities to recreate continuously a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity, older teenagers favour a plain aesthetic that foregrounds their links to others, thus expressing a notion of identity lived through authentic relationships. The article further contrasts teenagers' graded conception of `friends' with the binary classification of social networking sites, this being one of several means by which online privacy is shaped and undermined by the affordances of these s...
1,663 citations