The (in) visible relations and networks
09
Apr
One of the issues in focus today is social networks, they are not
of today, the problem is that today they are in evidence, but they continue to keep certain aspects of invisibility, confused with virtuality, make a historical analysis.
The networks of commerce in antiquity, by sea and by land, the invisible colleges, defined by Solla Price in her work “The development of science: historical, philosophical, sociological and economic analysis” of 1976 (in Brazilian edition), calls the scientific networks of collaborative networks, where researchers communicate, exchange information and experiences, means that even in the absence, through printed works and conferences, authors collaborate.
Essentially, a network is a web of nodes and links between nodes, although these participants are autonomous, the consequences of network connections can exceed their own limits by connecting to “out” through weak links. In the analysis of networks can be identified only for didactic reasons, three types: ego networking, global networking networks and networks of actors relationships, called TAN (Theory Actor-Network) with origin in the works of Michel Callon.
Airport networks, container transport networks around the world, Global networks are strongly influenced by the media, and they create a certain amount of invisibility, since the collaborative networks of publications are also called invisible colleges by authors like Solla Price, but accelerated by the speed of the media, electronic media is larger speed of publication and communication that prints it, then blog, twitter and the social media media like Facebook occupy a new role at the present time, but are not in themselves networks, but networks media.
Several measures can be thought of, the centrality of closeness of an actor measures how close a node is to all others, the greater the proximity measure, the intermediation betweenness measures the importance of a node in the circulation of information. So, for information effect, betweenness is the measure of control that an actor holds in the flow of information and closeness is the facility that an actor has of access to information.
The invisibility, emphasizing present in the “invisible” colleges in modernity, is relative to the process of communication and information that can go beyond the actor actors along the network, virtuality in turn refers to the potentiality of increasing the capacity of the network
