John is involved with Morningside Analytics, which I will look into further.
Some beginning comments of interest:
- Blogs are a key to the networked public sphere
- Communications research needs overhaul, our current methods misunderstand society: society doesn't fall into variables. Kelly uses network analysis
- we've always been a networked society; now we know it (Thank you!)
"There is an elite structure in political blogging that isn't demagogues yelling at each other." They blog on law and policy.
Q&A:
Taplin: Talk about how communications research needs to change?
Kelly: Comms research studies the poles of human communication (mass vs interpesonal), but it's the intervening levels, which has been the province of sociology, especially social network analysis.
Q: Why does linking behavior matters? How do they correlate to real social relationships?
Kelly: Historically, in SNA, we were looking at formal structures like families or clans. The relationships between what you represent and the social phenomena are more fluid now, and there are decades of work ahead of us to work that out.
