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How the Internet Facilitates Information Linkage Graphs

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/headed-to-shanksville-pa/

For my blog post I decided to talk about Information Linkage Graphs, from Chapter 2, and take an example from the news and apply that to it, specifically in a unique situation that contrasts times before and after social networking on the Internet became mainstreamed.

Information Linkage Graphs are key for examining who is connected to whom and who is sharing information with whom. Specifically, they can examine the relationships people have on the Internet and how information is exchanged between them. For my blog post, I used how the social network sites of Twitter and Facebook connected many mourners across the country on the 10th anniversary of September 11th. Each person, or person’s profile on the social networking site, is a node and each edge is the relationship they have between them and their “friends and followers.” This is a strong example of Information Linkage Graphs because it exemplifies how nodes and edges can be connected to allow for the flow of information in every aspect of our society’s daily lives.

To continue the example that people are the nodes and the edges are the information, feelings, photos, and thoughts that are shared between peoplem, we can examine social networks in regards to Information Linkage Graphs extensively. The Internet is a unique example of a place for Information Linkage Graphs because the frequency and scale of them is infinite. For everyone 1 person’s Facebook page, there are hundreds of edges connecting them to hundreds of other nodes. The same goes for Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, etc. The possibilities for sharing information in these linked graphs are endless. Although the study and existence of Information Linkage Graphs predates the web, the Internet facilitates these networks to be as extensive as they are now. For example, in the blog post I read on the New York Times website, one New York woman stated that her first reaction after her experience on September 11th, 2001 was to help put pictures, posters, and flowers up around Manhattan with other people who had lost loved ones. Now on the 10th anniversary of that day, people’s instinctive reactions are the same – they still want to sympathize and mourn with others, but now there methods are entirely different. Rather than “archaic” paper methods of self-expression, people are taking to their Twitter and Facebook accounts to mourn and share with their network of friends and family. Trendrr, a social media analytics firm, stated that just days before September 11th, 2011 approximately 451,350 had mentioned something about commemorating the event in their Twitter posts. These posts were all read by many of the other millions of people using Twitter, thus demonstrating how the spread of feelings and knowledge is so easily facilitated by the web and by the Information Linkage Graphs with in it.

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