  The structure of social relations is fundamental for the construction of
plausible simulation scenarios. It shapes the way actors interact and create
their identity within overlapping social contexts. Each actor interacts in
multiple contexts within different types of social relations that constitute
their social space. In this article, we present an approach to model structured
agent societies with multiple coexisting social networks. We study the notion
of context permeability, using a game in which agents try to achieve global
consensus. We design and analyse two different models of permeability. In the
first model, agents interact concurrently in multiple social networks. In the
second, we introduce a context switching mechanism which adds a dynamic
temporal component to agent interaction in the model. Agents switch between the
different networks spending more or less time in each one. We compare these
models and analyse the influence of different social networks regarding the
speed of convergence to consensus. We conduct a series of experiments that show
the impact of different configurations for coexisting social networks. This
approach unveils both the limitations of the current modelling approaches and
possible research directions for complex social space simulations.
