A estrutura complexa das redes sociais

Abstract

In this study, we discuss the presence of social structures in classical literature, in particular the ones by two writers: Homer ("Odyssey") and J.R.R. Tolkien ("The Silmarillion", "The Hobbit"and the trilogy "The Lord of the Rings"), that, somehow, influenced the society in different ways. In this context, based on the pieces of definition of social relations presented in this work, we analyze the literary social structures that are presented in these books, which have characteristics that are similar to the current online real social structures, like Facebook and Twitter, in which individuals interact in various ways. Therefore, we use graphs theory to study and compare the literary social structures present in that literature and the online real social structures, causing the appearance of connectivity distributions formed by the social relations among the characters (in the literary social structures) and among individuals (in online real social structures). Such distributions follow a power law with an exponential cutoff, which differs from connectivity distributions of structures found in the scientific literature. Other properties found in these analyzes are: the ubiquity attribute of the gods that are in the literary social structures (detected through varying the average path length of these structures); the friendship paradox; the transitivity; the assortativity; and the distribution of betweenness centrality. Due to these similarities between the two types of social structures that were studied, we chose to analyze the vulnerability, the efficiency and the homogeneity of social relations of literary social structures by some attack methodologies, like removing from these structures only a character, a group of characters or whole communities.