"About Facebook! Forward March!"(The Washington Post)
"On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data"(New York Times)
“One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
In other words, Facebook ― where users rate one another as “hot or not,” play games like “Pirates vs. Ninjas” and throw virtual sheep at one another ― is helping scholars explore fundamental social science questions.
“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”
