blog / Social Network Analysis: Durkheim’s Era to Contempo Social Media Spaces

Social Network Analysis: Durkheim’s Era to Contempo Social Media Spaces

Aditi Sharma

Aditi Sharma

B.Tech.

Emile Durkheim was a famous french philosopher and sociologist. He developed methods to combine empirical data with sociological theory. He used tools like graphs, surveys and historical observations for his studies, eventually leading to social network analysis as we know it today. He used these methods for his case study on suicides by catholic and protestant groups to quantitatively assess the situation.


He talked about how in modern society, what keeps people together will be different from the past. Durkheim postulated that commonalities in daily tasks and struggles drew people together in earlier times. He called it “mechanical solidarity”. He argued that modern society would instead be held together by differences termed “organic solidarity”. His work focused on studying these patterns of social relationships. The concept of social network analysis by analysing the empirical data and connecting the results to sociological phenomena originated there.


More about SNA

The modern social network analysis is of two types:


Ego network analysis

In this, they use surveys to study the relationships of a sample of people with the outside world. This is done by traditional surveys asking them about their relationships with other people. Instead of focusing on finding every relationship, it focuses on the density of the network of a single individual.

For example, the Facebook friend circle of a person from your school.


Complete network analysis

It analyses the relationships among the same sample space. The sample here is mainly taken from a particular domain. This analysis helps organisations and companies decide according to the relationship trends.


SNA in social media spaces

SNA aims to draw connections between communities by observing the relationships among people using practical methods and empirical data. Social media space developers use this analysis method to study their users and develop other features according to that. They use these studies to predict the outcome of certain new launches. It is the primary source of information about the current trend in society according to which the social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook run.

It is also used by organisations for team building and understanding the power dynamics in the office. This also leads to the conclusion that teams need to collaborate to boost for performance levels and better growth of the whole organisation



References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_and_organic_solidarity#Mechanical_solidarity

https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/social-network-analysis/theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis#Social_media_internet_applications

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/types-of-social-networks-analysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim

https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Sociology/Introduction_to_Sociology/Book%3A_Sociology_(Boundless)/01%3A_Sociology/1.02%3A_The_History_of_Sociology/1.2F%3A_Durkheim_and_Social_Integration