Dr. Bernie Hogan, a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will be presenting some of his fascinating research into the impact digital social information overload is having through a case study of Facebook:

Making sense of the networked audience: The case of Facebook

Social media sites are excellent at gathering friends, but not so great at making sense of them. This leads to social information overload: too many ties, too much information and too much tedium.

There is a great deal of information latent in these friendships that can be used to make sense of our networks, both spatially and relationally. Particularly through the use of social network analysis (SNA), we can discover hidden influencers and coherent clusters. This talk will give an overview of some concepts of social network analysis and demonstrate how these can be applied to online social media sites.

Bernie will use as case study his ongoing fieldwork on Facebook with Microsoft Research that  demonstrates mismatches between the way individuals organize their online friendships and the way that order emerges from the friendships naturally. These findings will be distilled into some general principles that can be applied to social network sites generally.