Social studies
For the longest time, people have understood that the way humans interact with one
another is actually very easy to describe in a network. People interact with people
every day. People influence one another every day. People exchange ideas every day.
As they do, these interactions cause ripple effects through the social environment that
they inhabit. Modeling these interactions as a graph has been of primary importance
to better understand global demographics, political movements, and—last but not
least—commercial adoption of certain products by certain groups. With the advent of
online social networks, this graph-based approach to social understanding has taken
a whole new direction. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (see
the following diagram featuring a visualization of my LinkedIn network), and many
others have undertaken very specific efforts to include graph-based systems in the way
they target their customers and users, and in doing so, they have changed many of our
daily lives quite fundamentally.