by Ogo A. Bellard

Created on: November 20, 2007   Last Updated: November 21, 2007

If you are like me and you have joined an online social network (OSN) site within the last few years, then this might be a question you find yourself asking from time to time. Indeed this is a question one should ask not only from within an OSN but your physical daily world too, but the difference is that in the world at large you actually get judge for yourself physically.

As human beings we are incredibly sensitive to a wide variety of external sensory input, especially to that of our own species. We have been observing our own behaviour and hard-wiring it into own DNA since before modern humans ever evolved; it is a survival trait to understand the meaning in your own species behaviour. When we physically interact with other people we are actually involved in a highly sophisticated and mostly subconscious flow of information, which is conveyed in hundreds of different ways like posture, smell, clothes, gestures, intonation, and especially the ceaseless subtle movements of our most expressive features; our face and eyes. Whether we realise it or not we do read, analyse and act on this constant stream of information.

So when faced with a profile instead of a person we immediately throw out a good percentage of these hard earned human judgemental abilities. This is not to say we loose all judgement ability but rather it is severely curtailed by a profound lack of information that would be normal in a face to face physical encounter. But in order to properly understand current popular OSN's like Facebook, My Space and Orkut, it is necessary to go back some hundred years to a man called George Simmel.

Though George Simmel was not the first to theorise about large social structures, he was the first to address it in terms of an actual social network as opposed to a social group. The difference being a social group is normally a set of people drawn tightly together for specific reasons like family, location and work. But a social network is a loose larger set of people that may be a part of different groups but are connected to others above and beyond those groups. We can find the relevance of social networks in the adage "It's not what you know; it's who you know that matters". Through his essays George birthed what would become known a Social Network Analysis (SNA) and lead to the formation of new disciplines like Sociometry, the quantitative study of social relationships.

Where SNA was different and indeed new in its approach was to place more importance on the

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