Social Network Structures and the Internet: Collective Dynamics i ...

It is ironic that the nature of the Internet as the vastest social network ever is being rediscovered, despite the fact that it was born and has never stopped being a network.

The possibility of computer-mediated social interactions opens the door to serious challenges as well as to valuable opportunities for communication and business. The cornerstone of the many-to-many interactions is people’s voluntary participation. Thus, the crucial question to ask is not just how to interact with individual consumers, but how to create and grow the online social collectivities in which a multitude of individuals voluntarily interact with one another. If everyone independently decides to participate, the aggregate outcomes will be simple sums of individual choices. Reality, however, is far more complicated than this. In an online social environment like virtual communities, individuals make decisions in conjunction with others’ decisions, creating very complex social dynamics. How many people are in the community? How many of them are active players? How many of them are lurkers who benefit from the community without making their own contributions? Each person’s motivation to communicate may be dependent on what others have done or are doing, and there may be numerous unknown factors affecting (positively or negatively) an individual’s motivation. In this environment in which everyone responds to everyone else, a small and subtle change in local interactions can eventually determine the fate of the entire community.

Rediscovering the potential of the Internet as a computer-mediated social network leads us to very complicated, but intriguing, areas of inquiry into the social dynamics of multiagent interactions. The objective of this book is to illuminate the implications of the social aspect of new digital media on advertising, business, and communication in general.