SNA

“Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities.” Stephanie refers to it as the “Kevin Bacon” game. Although I’ve played the game before, I never thought of it like that, but she’s right. Somehow everyone links back to each other. In an SNA a node is the network in which people communicate, a node can be a single person or a group of people. They are the senders/receivers of the message. Nodes are linked by lines when they communicate directly with one another. A line is the channel in which they communicate. In an organization, they use communications audits to help improve their communication.

“The first thing to consider is the positions or locations of each node, this is called the centrality.” Danielle states that this shows the “importance” of the node. An example of this is, in a hierarchical organization with vertical communication, the higher up on the hierarchical scale the more important the person/department. Centrality is measured in three ways, degrees, betweenness, and closeness.

The degree is the more direct connections a node has, the higher the degree. The node with the highest degree is called a “hub.” When I hear this I think of a computer hub, the thing that connects the network.

Betweenness is referred to the node that is in the best location because it is inbetween two important nodes. Without the node inbetween it would be hard for them to communicate. When I think of this I think or someone decoding or translating the message that occurs between two important people…the middleman.

Closeness refers to the nodes that have the most access to other nodes, because they have the quickest paths. They have the ability to monitor the information flow in a network (supervisor).

In my Organizational communication class at SUNY Albany, we were taught that boundary spanners are the people/department that control what flows in and out of the organization, while peripheral players have connections outside the network or organization.