Abstract:
We present a formal language for reasoning about the changing patterns of knowledge and friendship in social networks. A social announcement consists of an agent (the sender) transmitting some information (the message) to one or more other agents (the receivers) within a network and each of these three components can be described in different ways, from different perspectives. We discuss a number of conceptual issues that arise in such social communication and illustrate our ideas with a number of examples about cold-war spy networks and office gossip.