A love-hate relationship with my friends
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/papers/groupdiffusion/GroupDiffusionSecondLife.pdf
Is it love…is it hate, nobody knows. In an article written by David A. Huffaker, Chun-Yuen Teng, Matthew P. Simmons, Liuling Gong, Lada A. Adamic called Group Membership and Diffusion in Virtual Worlds they talk about the effects of network diffusion amongst friend groups. In the article, they state how there are two popular theories to explain network diffusion. The first being social influences where there are prominent social figures in one’s life that an individual’s decisions will gravitate towards or align with. These people may be family, friends, culture leader, political leaders, etc. The opinion of these people may not be the same as yours but because they are prominent figures in your life, you may tend towards their decisions. The second being homophily, where an individual seeks out people with similar interest, culture, beliefs, etc. Homophily groups tend to see group members adopt new ideas quicker as they already have an interest in the subject the group was formed already.
Now the first theory hold very true within my friend group. We are all individual who do have similar interests and beliefs but the first theory hold very true when it comes to games. Amiss all the problem sets, meetings, prelims, projects, and life there is always an urge to goof off and play games. Now whenever one of my friends starting playing a new game, slowly but surely everyone in the friend groups finds themselves playing the new game at some point. All it takes is for one person in our group and next thing you know everyone is playing the new game. It’s funny how we all joke about this happening but underneath all the laughs and jokes there is a true reason why this is all happening.