Comparative Analysis Of Microblog Relationship Network And Social Relationship Network

MicroBlog has been taking more and more important roles in social affairs and human relationship with the popularity of it. It was even proposed that Microblog represented the view of the society. Questions have been provoked. Whether does MicroBlog truly reflect the social network relationships in the real society? To what kind of extent does it participate in the network construction of social relationships? Are the relationships built in MicroBlog the same as the ones in real society? In this dissertation, we tried to investigate the issue from these points of views.Here in this dissertation, we took a relatively more active group of microblogging users, a class of graduate students from university, as a studying case, to make a comparative analysis between their in-reality relationship networks and their microblogging relationship networks. The comparison was performed from the perspective of the relationship by adopting the social network analysis method. Firstly, based on the characteristics of MicroBlog and the ways the students using it, we considered the microblogging relationship network to be a four dimensional (4-D) network which is characterized by four aspects, watching, commenting, spreading and quoting. Secondly, in the meantime, we classified their in-reality relationship networks into four different subtypes, which are differentiated by four aspects-studying, close friends or not, the power of influence, and the strength of relationship. After construction of the two kinds of networks, the microblogging one and the real one, we made a social network analysis of them, and got their relevant parameters such as network density, network degree of centrality, and inter-centrality. We further analyzed the two kinds of networks individually among their different dimensions/subtypes, respectively. In the meantime, we also analyzed the two kinds of networks in a one-to-one comparison way. The comprehensive comparative analysis showed that different kinds of relationship networks have different morphologies while sharing some common features and connections.We think these conclusions will be of great importance in the fields such as study of information-exchanging among microblogging users, promoting the integration of MicroBlog platform and other network platforms, and exploring the application of MicroBlog.