sociometry online

[johnf at earthlight.co.nz]

Sociometrists might (and, in my view, should) be very interested in the
fast growth of social networking sites - Bibo, Flickr, FaceBook, MySpace
and so on. Why - because this is the kind of sociometry in action that
Moreno advocated but which he could only laboriously detail with the
resources then at his disposal. Now, it's possible to see both the
moment-by-moment interactions and the cumulative significance, and
relationships, of very large groups of participants through current
research. And it's very interesting.
One such recent paper actually uses the language of 'stars' (though
there's no reference to sociometry) - and while the details may not be of
interest to many readers, the results may be. This article can be
downloaded from:
http://www.tomkinshome.com/papers/starpower/starpower.pdf

A source for much more research on online group interaction can be found at:

http://www.danah.org/SNSResearch.html

All this raises the question of where sociometrists or psychodramatists
might fit in all this. Isn't this the sort of thing that we should be
interested in and engaged with?
John Farnsworth
Dunedin