ABSTRACT
Socializing and collaboration are in the very nature of human beings. Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C. defines humans as a kind of “social animal” identifying socializing as a core attribute of the entity humans, posing this attribute at the same level as reasoning the sine qua non feature of humankind. Since early ages, humans organized and gathered together to cooperate in order to survive and assure the continuation of the species, and we observe this behavior in the various eras of history as well as in modern times. With the advent of experimental science, the industrial revolution, and the revival of Kantian philosophy and positivism in the XIX century, we witness the emergence of social sciences and in particular, sociology, led by scholars such as Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Georg Simmel, who studied social phenomena from a philosophical and scientific standpoint introducing concepts and background theory, and contributing in this way to the establishment of social science as a discipline by the end of the nineteenth century and laying down the concepts for what is now known as social networks. In the first half of the twentieth century different approaches to social networks theory and practice were developed in the United States and the United Kingdom. With the advent of computers in the 1960s and 1970s and as a result of
the work of a growing number of social science scholars, new methods and analytical tools for social networks appeared in various universities including Harvard, California, Chicago, and others. In parallel, advances in computer science and electronics led to the establishment of information and communication technologies in the last few decades, which have become enablers for new means of communication and collaboration among persons and groups in contemporary society.
