Info Under The Radar

EP04 | Dissecting Social Media Networks with Dr. Sakthi Balan

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In the fourth episode of Info Under the Radar we are going to talk about Social Media and explore it from the eye of a social media researcher. We talk about how social media has impacted our day-to-day conversations over time, it’s history, how did Facebook cracked the code of connecting over a billion people, how to deal with misinformation and much more!

In this episode, our guest is Dr. Sakthi Balan. He is a researcher in the field of Social media network analysis and Professor at The LNMIIT, Jaipur(India). Dr. Balan is a graduate from IIT Madras and then he went on to do his postdoc from University of Western Ontario. He also has corporate research experience from his days of working with Infosys. 

Feel free to use timestamps to jump around the topics that interest you most:

  • (00:00)-Intro
  • (11:10)-How is he doing during pandemic
  • (13:34)-How does he use social media
  • (16:02)-How has social media impacted over conversation style over time
  • (18:30)-Strong and weak ties
  • (27:45)-Barabási’s study of structure in a Social network
  • (29:07)-History of social media
  • (36:54)-How Facebook figured out how to connect that many people
  • (41:01)-Social media capitalizing on the psychological aspect
  • (44:05)-How does he keeps himself away from the ill effects of social media
  • (47:31)-Is technology alone enough to resolve the misinformation spread issue with social media
  • (51:06)-Who decides the boundary on how to regulate information
  • (55:04)-Positive side of social media
  • (57:25)-Is social media imparting empathy or sympathy?
  • (59:10)-Dr. Balan’s journey to social media research
  • (66:30)-How does he teaches his children about social media and his fear as a parent


    • Recommended books:

      •         Network Science : https://bit.ly/2OtZzRZ

              Laws of Emotion: https://bit.ly/3cURi2D

              Society of Mind: https://bit.ly/39RNHAx

      • Reach out to us with your comments, suggestions, or critique here:

        •         Twitter : @infounderradar | Instagram : @infoundertheradar

                Your hosts on Twitter: Devendra(@InDevOut) & Vishwajeet(@vishwajeets3)

        • Reach out to our guest for this episode Dr. Sakthi Balan : Dr. Balan’s LinkedIn
        • Music Credits:

          •         Origami by Johny Grimes https://soundcloud.com/johny-grimes

                  Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

                  Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/_-origami

                  Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/m-pdlZ7VaDE

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          Info Under The RadarBy Vishwajeet and Devendra