Thanks for your comment about using social networks to study social
networks, but I did not also mean that we ought to study ourselves. In my
experience there is no phenomenon into which I have less insight than
myself, and I don't see why that wouldn't be true of networks, too.
Introspection is a good source of hypotheses, but not necessarily of cogent
evidence; a good starting point, but not a good place to stop.
What I did have in mind was networks as informal 'institutions' that could
have both the spatial and temporal span needed to study network-scale
phenomena. In a sense these have existed for a long time in the natural
sciences that deal with phenomena like wide-area ecology, biogeography,
global geology, global biological evolution, etc. Even map-making and
census-taking. The latter however seems to be about as close as our culture
has got to applying this principle to eco-social systems. Now that we have
the global means of easy and rapid communication and data exchange, we
could take it a lot further.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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