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What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network. I’m sure many people have had this feeling, but these data make this effect more transparent.

The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.

All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends. Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties. One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated. Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement, we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.

INTRODUCTORY TEXTS FOR COURSE Boellstorff. T. Coming of Age in Second life (Princeton 2008) Cameron, F. & Kenderdine, S., Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (MIT 2007) Horst, H. and Miller, D. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg 2006) Kalay, Y.E. et al, New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2008) Ito. M et. al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. (MIT Press: forthcoming Kelty, C. Two Bits: the cultural significance of free software. (Duke 2008) Macdonald, S. & Basu, P., Exhibition Experiments (Blackwell 2007) Miller, D. and Slater, D. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (Berg 2001) Parry, R., Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007) Tilley, C., Keane,W. Kuchler,S. Rowlands, M. Spyer, P. Handbook of Material Culture.(Sage 2006) Were, G. 'Out of touch? digital technologies, ethnographic objects and sensory orders'. In Chatterjee, H. (ed.) Touch in Museums (Berg 2008)