Social Thermodynamics:Modelling Communication Dynamics in Social Network
Dinesh Pothineni, Pratik Mishra, Aadil Rasheed
Journal of Information & Systems Management, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2012.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jism/fulltext/v2n4/3.pdf
Abstract:
Thermodynamics, a concept thought of two centuries ago, refurbished and elaborated since, assimilated and transposed to distinctive disciplines stretching from neuroscience to economics but still lacks in-depth exploration of its impact on social networks. The aim is to model thermodynamic principles after social networks, to understand how different variables of the system such as entropy, temperature, energy and pressure steers the communication between agents at a broader sense. These innate synthetic variables of social thermodynamics can expose; varied and difficult to analyze dynamics in a network with higher order of approximation. Quantifying these variables in this context has promising applications in business intelligence, information diffusion and network analysis. This paper casts light on distinct attempts to measure social entropy and other social thermodynamic variables, while presenting methods to construct various thermodynamic processes to study these variables in a restricted environment. We further discuss our observations, findings and challenges in modeling social network as a thermal gaseous system. The paper focus on how these variables behave and what the standard relations signify in social context, more detailed analysis of Isochoric and Adiabatic process equivalents are studied while addressing roadblocks encountered by theorists in the past. Our models are experimented with sample sets collected over a period of 6 months from an enterprise social network for 250K users with over 860M connections. We aim to extend the scope of social interaction analysis beyond todayâ€™s limitation, thus benefiting from many wide-established principles in thermodynamics.