Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 18
Stories and social networks
Warren Sack
University of California, Berkeley, CA
Introduction
What's so important about stories?
The Internet has engendered a myriad of new
social relations. These social relations, or “social networks” (see, for example,
Wasserman & Galaskiewicz 1994) are forged by individuals through electronic
mail and Internet-based chat. Some of the very active interchanges focus on
movies, television programs, and news stories. In other words, a non-trivial
portion of these social networks are based on discussions of widely circulated
stories
. Virtual, on-line communities are a result of these net-mediated, story-
based relations.
To imagine that these new social relations (and the resultant virtual com-
munities) are important, one must grasp the significance of storytelling in the
first place. It matters which stories people know, which stories they tell, how
they tell them, and how they are referred to. Narration, methods of citation and
quotation, specific narratives, and general narrative forms constitute a kind
of common sense upon which virtual and imaginary communities have been
built (e.g., Anderson 1983). “. . . [C]ommon sense is our storehouse of nar-
rative structures, and it remains the source of intelligibility and certainty in
human affairs.” (Schafer 1981). These presuppositions are the presuppositions
of media studies (Hall 1982) and have also been integrated into some artificial
intelligence (AI) research projects. The work of Roger Schank, Robert Abelson
and their students is notable in this regard. Its close affinities with certain ques-
tions of media studies is unsurprising given the genealogy of the work. Robert
Abelson did political analysis with media studies colleagues before his work in
AI (e.g., de Sola Pool, Abelson & Popkin 1965).
