An interesting paradox of Social network

Every has a facebook account, you and your friends form the blow social network.But do you know the secret hide behind the facebook social network?

During the research of facebook, professor found that a user has an average of 190 friends but their friends have an average of 635 friends.

Maybe you would be a litter disappointed about the result. You spend plenty of your time on facebook. Every day you update your state and upload some photos or share some interesting things with your friends. You try to make friend online and maintain the friendship. Unfortunately, even though you have done so much, your friends are still less than your friends' friends.The same tendency was also found in offline social network.

However, we don't need to worry about it because the result is a statistic result, which has nothing to do with the personal character. The average number of your friends' friends are always more than yours. This phenomenon was called friends paradox.

Now I will try to explain the phenomenon. When you walk into a gym you may found everyone in the gym looks like this:

You may found that nearly everyone is stronger than you. But don't be shame of it. Because if you don't have ardent love for gym the result is right equals to expectation. Why? Because you didn't count in the person who stay at home.The people in gym doesn't represent the average level.

This also explain why people always think the congestion of airport, beach and other place are bad than the statistic average. Because when this places are empty, there exist no one to witness the moment.

Let use a small social network modle to explain it.

Abby, Becca, Chloe and Deb are four students and the edges between means the friendship. For Abby, she has one friends and Becca has three. We can easy calculate the average friends number is 8/4=2.

Now let calculate the average friends number of your firends.

For Abby, her friends Becca has 3 friends.

For Chloe, her firends Becca has 3 friends and her friends Deb has two friends. 

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At last ,we calculate the result is 2.25, a litter higher than 2.

Why this  phenomenon happen? Because the person like Becca contribution more to the result. Her contribution is more than liner. Becca has been mentioned for three times so her contribution is 3X3.

That's why our friends' friends are always more than our's. Our friends' scores are square after the weighted average' and it would be bigger than our score without square.

Communication and social behavior on the internet

    Last week， We have learned something about some social behavior on the internet， including Collaboration，epistemology and knowledge and especially Knowledge Building.

    The Knowledge Building (KB) theory was created and developed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia for describing what a community of learners needs to accomplish in order to create knowledge. The theory addresses the need to educate people for the knowledge age society, in which knowledge and innovation are pervasive.

    Furthermore, there are 12 famous principles of knowledge building.
    I'll list some below：

    1.Real ideas and authentic problems. In the classroom as a Knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding, based on their real problems in the real world.
    2.Improvable ideas. Students' ideas are regarded as improvable objects.

    more details can be view in Scardamalia's knowledge building theory.

    Let's back to the interesting class activity we join last class. Last week we read an article <Social Cloud Computing:A Vision for Socially Motivated Resource Sharing>. We read the article and try to answer three questions,both individual and by group work:
   
    The first is "What is the definition of Social Cloud?"
    The second question is "What are the possible applications of a Social Cloud？"
    The third question is“Do you have any critiques against this article？”
   
    I think our epistemic aims at reading the article and understand it and then think about the opinions in the article.
    In the first two questions, we only approach at metacognition level so we don't have any difference.
    But for the third question, we have several different opinions on it.You can see it in the pictures follow:

    You can see, there are some difference ideas between us.It shows that there are some differences in the cognitive process by Individuals and groups.So the result is clearly  different.
    In the discussion, we follow three principles:

    1.Share openly what we do not understand, "What I need to understand..." or "What I need to know..."
    2.Respect each other's perspectives and tentative understandings.
    3.Express disagreement in a constructive fashion.
    in the course of discussion, we exchange views, eventually get some inspiration from the other party, to higher cognition level.

 

    I think in a team，our ideas can be analyzed, pointed at, talked about, and progressively refined over time. So I think work in a team will benefit more than by individual.
   

The three levels of congition

    We ascertain that cognition is the functional basis of intelligent behaviour as it is exhibited by human beings. Admittedly, the biopsychologists still do not know all details of how human cognition works, but those essential cognitive functions in our brain, which enable the outstanding human capabilities we are so proud of, can yet be described to a quite satisfying extent.
    In science, cognition is a group of mental processes that includes attention, memory, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, science and computer science. The term's usage varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. It is also used in a branch of social psychology called social cognition to explain attitudes, attribution, and groups dynamics.
    There are three level of cognition: The first level is cognition and then follows the metacognition and the highest level is epistemic cognition.
    You can see it in the following picture:

cognition process

    Cognition is observe,it's a low level Cognition.
    Low-level cognitive are those of the different kinds of basic information processing elements (neurons) and the structure and internal processing organisation of the neural networking in the human brain. These functions are the basic enablers of the functions of the higher levels.
    Then we turn to second levels - metacognition.Most people can reach the second level and it's hard to go further because epistemic cognition  needs more times and energy.

    Here is a kind of interesting description of three levels:

    The first stage: the mountain is the mountain, water is water. This is the understanding of the whole superficial general knowledge and things on the surface, on the external characteristics.

    Second stage: Mountain is non-mountain, water is non-water. With careful analysis, we can understanding the various parts of the various properties. Clear the characteristics and properties of the various parts of this things and things with it, it is part of the relationship between What are the similarities and differences. Because we focus on part of the things ,various attributes of things, so it is not the thing itself, in our eyes it is not the original thing. 

    Third stage: Mountain is still mountain, water is still water. Reason why a thing is that thing, because it has the experience back to the details of things and understanding the whole thing back to the attributes of the essence of things, and different from other things in essential attribute.  They are still that things. But this time people see things in a rich connotation, both as a whole and part, both external and internal.

What does social tech bring to us?

In the last two weeks, I have gained an overview understanding of social network. I also learned about social task and social media.

There are plenty kinds of social networking websites. Google Occupy seven of the top ten most visited website. What surprise me is that face-book is the top 1 most visited websites. As far as I know, face-book was on service since Feb 2004. The results show us the demand of social networking is really huge.

The demand for social has promoted many different social media such as facebook, twitter, youtube and blogs. In China, we can’t use facebook and twitter because of the “wall” so we use “renren” and “weibo” instead. A few years ago, blogs are the most popular social media. As times passed, most blogger turn to face-book and twitter because it’s a more real-time media. The news would be in face-book and twitter in few minutes and then disappear. But you may see some “news” in blog was happened a few months ago.

In my opinion, facebook and twitter are like a river. The information in the river is flowing all the time and news would come to the river every single second. Blogs is more similar to lakes. The things in lakes aren’t complete statistic, them flows very slowly.

The development of tech has brought many changes in social network. I can’t say it is good or bad. But I do think most people are fickleness nowadays. They don’t want to read books or even a long passage. There was a English satirical film called < Black Mirror - The National Anthem >.

Three stories of criticism the TV  from different levels . In "Your whole history " . TV is both the small stage of the personal privacy, and may also be the pillory of selling theirselves. In "Value of 15 million", television has become some kind of psychotropic drugs and violence reign tools, force people to watch the entertainment and pornographic programming, talent show for 24 hours. The show is controlled by the three judges intensified to promote the concept of consumerism. In "National Anthem" , the speed of the dissemination of information of TV began to be inferior, but it is still a collective watch the ceremony stage, but also the emotional incitement "rabble". Female reporter for news at the expense of hue, to risk their lives, and only get shot in the leg after the dog howling - TV personality Brooke irony TV.

The satire brings me into a deep thinking. Maybe we have gone too far and too fast in the carnival of the feast.