User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS/SGT

First draft of the Sociogram timeline

(possibly) 390's - Plato
In 'Alcibiades I', Plato traces for the first recorded time the relationship between cybernetics (from the greek kybernetes, meaning steersman) and governance. In fact, the Latin form of the word is, indeed, gubernetes.

1920's - Alexei Gastev
Alexei Gastev, the founder of the Central Institute of Labour whose work most contributed to the spreading of taylorist ideals in the Soviet Union, believed that revolution could only be recognized as such if the workers were empowered to control the work processes. He trained workers to behave and think in a rational way, going so far as to build a social engineering machine, whose ways nobody, to this day, understands.

1930's - Jacob L. Moreno's sociogram
In the late 1930's, Jacob Levy Moreno, psychologist and the founder of sociometry, accomplished quite a successful intervention at the New York State Training School for Girls Hudson, whose drop out rate was way above average. Diagnosing the problem as one embedded in the existing network of social relationships between the girls, he conducted a simple survey to help him "map the network" - thus creating a sociogram.

1940 - "Foundations of Sociometry"
In "Foundations of Sociometry", Jacob Levy Moreno aknowledges the importance of informational technologies over networks by observing the distorting effect of the printed page over human spontaneity. Such observation made Moreno realize the effects of the superimposition of a "mechanical-social network" upon a "psycho-social network" in removing society from human control. Sociometric research is all the more accurate the more social atoms participate. Participation entails better tracing of patterns, habits and relations, in this way making social engineering all the more fine-tuned towards general productivity.

1948 - Norbert Wiener
The English word for kybernetes is coined by Norbert Wiener in his book "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine". (to develop further)

1970 - Relational Databases
In the 1970's Edgar F. Codd presented, in the realm of computation, the concept of relational databases as a substitute to hierarchical databases. Instead of presenting data in a navigation unfriendly hierarchical way, where one's means of addressing data is by position, relational databases present the data and relationships between them in a table format, where information is accessible by value. (to develop further)'Italic text

2000's - Social Graph
The term "social graph" was coined at the Facebook F8 conference in 2007. The choice of the word "graph" removes it further away from the normative sciences, placing it in the realm of pure mathematical analysis. (to develop further)

2010's
In 2010 Facebook's social graph becomes the largest social network dataset in the world. (to develop further)