Digital technology has introduced an age of social connectivity unprecedented in human history. A special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, guest-edited by SFI External Professors Jessica Flack and Raissa D’Souza, examines how digital technology affects human social networks, and the tools scientists use to study them.
In their overview, Flack and D’Souza call attention to the growth of digital social networks, their promise for empirical study of behavioral dynamics, and the possibility of controlling human social behaviors through technology. “The purpose of this special issue,” they write, "is to review what is currently known about how these technologies are changing social networks and what the consequences will be for human social dynamics.”
Among the research papers presented in the special issue is the Impact of Changing Technology on the Evolution of Complex Informational Networks by SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt. In his paper, Bettencourt argues that “the most interesting aspect of the dynamics of informational networks in complex systems is that they are the physical manifestations of processes of evolution, inference, and learning, from natural ecosystems, to cities and to online environments.” He presents superlinear scaling as a quantitative property of social informational networks, and gives a framework for understanding how networks move from initially static and information-poor states toward dynamic, diverse, and interconnected ones.
Read the current issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE (December 2014)
Read the Scanning the Issue, by Jessica Flack and Raissa D’Souza (December 2014)
Read the Impact of Changing Technology on the Evolution of Complex Informational Networks by Luis Bettencourt (December 2014)