I’ve been doing social network analysis since 2001. With the upswing over the past few years of the social networking sites the language has got a bit blurry. When I do my NetWork workshops, I now need to help people distinguish the basics of “social networks” as distinct from the phenomenon of linking.

Mike Gotta, in his Collaborative Thinking blog (which I started reading just a short time ago), provides a great service by summarizing notes on the history of social network analysis. (The notes are taken from a book by Linton Freeman.) Notes include snippets of the contributions to the field, beginning with Auguste Comte in 1853 along with a summary of the key learnings from the research over the years.

He summarizes Comte’s contribution: “Comte applied structural terms to argue that people within a social system are interconnected, a concept core to much of the research that emerged in the 1930’s concerning social networks.” This notion of the structure underneath networks is one of the core principles I use in my book to help people learn to use the network lens.

My friend Jessica also blogged about Mike’s post, and I love her insertion of a quote from Alexis deTocqueville about Americans and our way of forming associations. I read that this morning just after an email from my own small Town’s emerging group of activists concerned about the future of our schools. I’ve been thinking about doing some maps.