Much action within social networks occurs ostensibly as a dyadic behavioral gesture or verbal utterance or response directed to a particular alter. And that is how we often code behavior within networks. Yet, in many instances, integral to a behavior or utterance's meaning and relational objectives is the presence of an audience. Indeed, the behavior or gesture may be more urgently targeted at the audience than the ostensible principal alter. A student insults a teacher, but more to entertain classmates and signal friendship clique membership than to express enmity toward the teacher per se. Another student bullies a schoolmate, but more to gain status with the cool kids than to express animosity toward the afflicted schoolmate. An email between colleagues includes a cc to the department manager— arguably the alter of primary concern, despite not being explicitly addressed. A patron supplies a favor to another man's client, more as a signal of respect to the other patron than to build a relation with the fortuitously served client. A participant on social media responds, ostensibly, to the immediately preceding post, but the actual target may be the initiator of the thread, another respondent, or potentially someone outside the thread entirely. Or, as in the epigraph we cite at the outset, one superpower sends a signal to another via local actions against neighbors who are mostly exchangeable tokens in a geopolitical game. This is how strategic diplomacy works.

These are examples of “side-directed behavior,” Frans de Waal's (1982, pp. 37–40) term to describe a common pattern in chimpanzee social networks, in which, for example, competition among males for leadership of the colony is carried out in the context of observing females. We have two main arguments to put forward in this chapter. First, we misunderstand and quite likely miscode action within networks when we fail to appreciate, and fail to code as a potentially distinct type of tie, ulterior motive-based behavior directed fundamentally towards co-present audiences and other third parties