So far, it's been a lot of fun calculating numbers and arranging them into nifty little tables, but what's the point? It turns out that properties such as clustering and path length are incredibly important for social processes! In particular, they're important for contagion: the spread of ideas, disease, or anything else that moves from person to person. Understanding how network structure influences the spread of diseases and ideas makes it possible to
Contagion – how things spread
Simple contagion
A simple contagion is a social process in which each individual becomes infected after a single exposure. Simple contagions are good models for highly contagious diseases, or the spread of uncontroversial...