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Mar. 25, 2013 Researchers studied thousands of ceramic and obsidian artifacts from A.D. 1200-1450 to learn about the growth, collapse and change of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic Southwest.

The advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have made us all more connected, but long-distance social networks existed long before the Internet.

An article published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on the transformation of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic American Southwest and shows that people of that period were able to maintain surprisingly long-distance relationships with nothing more than their feet to connect them.

Led by University of Arizona anthropologist Barbara Mills, the study is based on analysis of more than 800,000 painted ceramic and more than 4,800 obsidian artifacts dating from A.D. 1200-1450, uncovered from more than 700 sites in the western Southwest, in what is now Arizona and western New Mexico.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Mills, director of the UA School of Anthropology, worked with collaborators at Archeology Southwest in Tucson to compile a database of more than 4.3 million ceramic artifacts and more than 4,800 obsidian artifacts, from which they drew for the study.

They then applied formal social network analysis to see what material culture could teach them about how social networks shifted and evolved during a period that saw large-scale demographic changes, including long-distance migration and coalescence of populations into large villages.

Their findings illustrate dramatic changes in social networks in the Southwest over the 250-year period between A.D. 1200 and 1450. They found, for example, that while a large social network in the southern part of the Southwest grew very large and then collapsed, networks in the northern part of the Southwest became more fragmented but persisted over time.

"Network scientists often talk about how increasingly connected networks become, or the 'small world' effect, but our study shows that this isn't always the case," said Mills, who led the study with co-principal investigator and UA alumnus Jeffery Clark, of Archaeology Southwest.

"Our long-term study shows that there are cycles of growth and collapse in social networks when we look at them over centuries," Mills said. "Highly connected worlds can become highly fragmented."

Another important finding was that early social networks do not appear to have been as restricted as expected by settlements' physical distance from one another. Researchers found that similar types of painted pottery were being created and used in villages as far as 250 kilometers apart, suggesting people were maintaining relationships across relatively large geographic expanses, despite the only mode of transportation being walking.

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Artifacts shed light on social networks of the past

Researchers analyzed thousands of artifacts like this ceramic bowl to learn about social networks in the pre-Hispanic Southwest between A.D. 1200 and 1450. Credit: Mathew Devitt, Arizona State Museum

Published: March. 25, 2013 at 8:04 PM

TUCSON, March 25 (UPI) -- Long before Twitter and Facebook, societies maintained social networks even when the only network "traffic" was people moving on foot, U.S. researchers say.

Scientists at the University of Arizona studying late pre-Hispanic American Southwest societies said their findings show people of that period were able to maintain surprisingly long-distance relationships with nothing more than their feet to connect them.

UA anthropologist Barbara Mills and colleagues analyzed more than 800,000 painted ceramic and more than 4,800 obsidian artifacts dating from A.D. 1200-1450, uncovered from more than 700 sites in what is now Arizona and western New Mexico.

Analysis of the materials showed how social networks shifted and evolved during a period that saw large-scale demographic changes, including long-distance migration and coalescence of populations into large villages, a university release reported Monday.

Similar types of painted pottery were being created and used in villages as far as 150 miles apart, suggesting people were maintaining relationships across relatively large distances even when the only mode of transportation was walking, the researchers said.

"That really shocked us, this idea that you can have such long distance connections. In the pre-Hispanic Southwest they had no real vehicles, they had no beasts of burden, so they had to share information by walking," Mills said.

"It changes our picture of the Southwest."

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Study: Social networking is not new

Take a Screen Shot on OSX And Share it Universally
follow me @followed activism, advertising, alcohol, alternative-news, ancient-history, animals, animation, anime, architecture, arts, astronomy, atheist, biz...

By: Andrew Willard

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Take a Screen Shot on OSX And Share it Universally - Video

Bitly, the popular URL-shortening service, released a graphic visualization of the world's social networking site usage this week. The interactive graphic, which includes international favorites such as Weibo and Renren (China), Ameba (Japan), and Odnoklassniki (Russia), also offers unexpected insight into how internet users worldwide connect with friends and follow the news. Iranians love to follow American websites such as LinkedIn and Google+. Chinese users mostly use local websites, and is the one country in the world where China hasn't gained a toehold. Meanwhile, South Koreans love Tumblrand use it at rates far exceeding the United States.

The study, published on programming repository (and quasi-social network) Github, tracks clicks worldwide to sites shortened through Bitly's servers. We sampled our data twice per month in 2012, then counted up how many clicks came from each country and social network. Adding all this up gave us a Bitly-wide breakdown of the social network traffic we see, said Bitly chief scientist Hillary Mason in a blog post.

One of the biggest surprises from the study is the failure of Chinese websites to penetrate other Chinese-speaking lands. Popular mainland-based social networking sites such as Weibo have relatively low adoption rates in Hong Kong and Taiwan; Taiwanese users mostly ignore both Weibo and Twitter in favor of Tumblr, which is extremely popular locally.

Tumblr, meanwhile, is the most-clicked on international social network in South Korea by a longshot. In the United States, Pinterest is the website most likely to be clicked on through Bit.ly-shortened links. The study isn't perfect of course. Only traffic routed through Bitly is counted and some popular country-specific social networking services such as South Korea's Cyworld aren't included. This methodology resulted in some surprising resultssuch as the vibrant Portuguese-language social networks in Brazil largely falling off the map.

Inside Iran, it seems that internet users see social networking sites as a way to access foreign news and job opportunities instead of for casual communication. Google+ is Iran's most popular social network by far (and the country with the highest Google+ usage rate worldwide), with LinkedIn and Reddit serving as close runners up. Iran's social media scene seems dominated by American social networks, with the exception of Chinese site Doubanwhich is almost as popular as Reddit.

Meanwhile, internet users in the former Soviet Union prefer Russian-based sites such as Odnoklassniki and Vk, but use American and Japanese web services at nearly identical levels. In former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan and Lithuania, users seem as happy to use American services like LinkedIn as its Russian competitors.

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Why Koreans Love Tumblr, And Other Social Network Surprises

BLUEFIELD The shame and stigma associated with sexual assault can make it difficult for victims to come forward. Now, the ease and speed of gossiping via social networking is making it even harder.

Sgt. M.D. Clemons, with the West Virginia State Police Crimes Against Children Unit, said many teen victims are scared to speak up. They are scared of the stigma, the shame. Even though its 2013, the victim gets blamed all over again, which is what we work to try to prevent.

In the high-profile Steubenville, Ohio, rape case, in which two teen boys were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl, the victim received threats on social networking sites after the conviction. A 16-year-old girl has now been charged with aggravated menacing after using Twitter to make a death threat against the victim, while a 15-year-old who posted a threat on Facebook has been charged with one count of menacing.

Although these threats occurred after the conviction, Clemons said social media discussions about sexual assault cases and victims begin as soon as people in a community realize an investigation is underway.

Anybody that has access to any social media account can comment, Clemons said. Strangers who dont know anyone involved will comment.

The shame of it is, parents are doing it, too. You can tell by the posts, she added.

Clemons said teens are aware of this, and it makes it hard for victims to come forward knowing youre going to go through this, knowing these days nothing is kept secret, no matter how hard you try to keep it private. These things used to be talked about around a watercolor, now it spreads like wildfire on the Internet. Its instant.

Those who have never been a sexual assault victim or worked with victims dont understand the dynamics of such cases, or the shame and fear felt by victims, Clemons said.

Its not like you tell your story once and its over, she said. Youre going to relive it especially if its high profile over and over again.

In the Steubenville case, the victim was called derogatory names on social networking sites, something Clemons has seen happen to local victims. They are not only victimized by the perpetrators, theyre victimized by society.

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Online gossip: Social networking can become a nightmare for victims