What's the Point? 101

Ironically this weekend I've been working on a Family Tree project for my mothers side of the family. My Great-Uncle has been doing a family e-mailing list for a few years now and I had never been apart of it. But when my mom forwarded me the e-mail talking about how one member of my extremely extended family had started a family tree on ancestry.com I had to take a stand and have my family start their tree on geni.com Not that the reasons matter much to you, but I didn't want to use ancestry.com because they charge you to use their site whereas geni.com is first of all FREE and it's a collaborative site-- Meaning you and your family can all go on there at the same time and update anything they want.

And today I've been attempting to read this weeks articles. I first tried to listen to Dr. Karen Stephenson's podcast, it sounded promising.. the introduction claimed it was a "fascinating talk" but no matter how fascinating the material might have been, she sounded as dull as safety scissors. So I pressed on and read Introduction to Social Network Theory by Charles Kadushin thankfully most of the article was readable but it started me wondering: Is this worth writing about?

To me, networks (of people) seem common sense, specifically the "points" Kadushin was stating, such as people who are geographically close to each other are more likely to be friends than those who aren't or that all it takes is one "tie" to each other for humans to give an excuse to forge a relationship (friendship or otherwise) such as going to the same school. I would say as a general rule, people are constantly looking for any excuse to create a relationship with another person.

What I am not understanding is why there is a need to study networks in this way. I completely understand the importance in recording networks and I can even understand what we can gain by studying the networks we record. But WHY oh WHY do we need to study these theories behind networks when they seem so obvious and first nature? We have studied human communication for reasons that I can agree with but to study this topic in these terms, I think is an unnecessary step.

What do you think? Leave a comment, let me know. Try not to be too harsh on me