Information Technology Reference
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essential needs such as perceptual feeling and their context, the analysis extends to
the content information as well as the context of users. Moreover, we would like
to explore the collaborative social network intelligence for quality decision results.
Recently, the number of user generated contents (UGC) in social media has
been increasing rapidly. Ordinary people have now become producers of digital
contents as well as consumers. They are capable of publishing their own contents
and opinions on the social media such as FaceBook and Youtube. According to
the definition of Wikipedia, collaboration is a recursive process where two or
more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common
goals [20]. The information obtained from different social media sources may
provide critical and essential information for user to make decisions. Since col-
laboration does not require leadership and can sometimes bring better results
through decentralization and egalitarianism [18]. Users may strengthen their abil-
ity from various information sources of the social networks, including both het-
erogeneous and homogeneous social network relationships. Therefore, the social
networks could reserve huge valuable information sources, and worthy for ad-
vanced utilization.
2 Proximal Social Network Intelligence
While social networks may contain abundant information for further utilization,
but altruism between unfamiliar strangers is rarely seen. For the sake of increasing
collaboration opportunities, there should be some incentives or stimulus that will
increase the possibility of altruistic behaviors. There exist some psychological bar-
riers that influence user's mind for contributing their ability for group's benefits.
However, those barriers could be overcome by certain mental encouragements.
Classic social science studies long ago demonstrated that proximity frequently
increases the rate of individuals communicating and affiliating in organizations
and communities [1, 5]. Proximity also develops strong norms of solidarity and
cooperation. Sociologists and anthropologists have long recognized that people
can feel close to distant others and develop common identities with distant others
who they rarely or never meet [2, 10]. Besides geographical distance, proximity
places increased emphasis on individual homophily personal characteristics. The
principle of homophily provides the basis for numerous social interaction proc-
esses. The basic idea is simple: “people like to associate with similar others” [3,
11, 15]. In this chapter, we utilize the concept of proximity to explore the social
network intelligence and stress the collective efforts of participants in the dynamic
environment. Homophylic user groups are more likely to combine the strength of
different individuals to achieve specific objectives.
On the basis of the proximity concept, interpersonal social relationships could
become vital information source with plentiful social energy for altruistic behav-
iors. The interpersonal social relationships can be defined by tie strength as weak
or strong ties based on the following combinations: time, emotional intensity, in-
timacy, and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie. [7] According to
Marsden and Campbell, tie strength depends on the quantity, quality, and fre-
quency of knowledge exchange between actors, and can vary from weak to strong.
