Extracting Communication Networks (E2) - Aral and Marshall 2011

[HyunkuKwon]

Post questions about the following exemplary reading here:

Aral, Sinan and Marshall Van Alstyne. 2011. “The Diversity-Bandwidth Trade-off.” American Journal of Sociology 117(1): 90-171.

[william-wei-zhu]

The authors describes bandwidth as not only about the frequency of communication, but also about the complexity of information. Yet the authors measured bandwidth as the average number of incoming emails per contact during certain time period. I wonder if it makes more sense to also include the average text length of emails per contact as a component of bandwidth?

[jacyanthis]

It seems like the “weak ties” and “structural holes” literature is very focused on the benefits of those phenomena, yet in the real world, people don’t seem to be clamoring for those network positions. I appreciate that Aral 2011 gets at this with the “low bandwidth” of weak ties, but is there literature on the other downsides of weak ties?

Examples: (1) distant actors may struggle to understand and thus contribute to the relevant questions of their distant interlocutors; (2) forging weak ties may be relatively expensive; (3) weak ties may be quickly saturated, such that someone in the actor’s community probably already has the weak ties and forging a similar tie contributes very little

[zshibing1]

If variables such as channel bandwidth are measured in any other way, would the rather linear relationship between diversity and bandwidth break?

[MOTOKU666]

Weak ties here are measured by e-mail data captured directly from the corporate server. However, I'm somehow doubtful about the application of the weak-tie concept with communication online but not based on the network they make via face-to-face communication. Would the approach setting up weak ties matters here?

[hesongrun]

This is a very interesting paper. I am wondering if the authors use some information-theoretic related concepts to measure the bandwidth of communication?