During the symposium, Betty talked about the theory that individual behaviour aggregates to collective behaviour. She used the example of indigenous cultures who still understood and worked around a sense of social network and community even without internet connectivity. This goes to show that networking isn’t something that was determined by technology, it’s been around for millenniums, the birth of social media helped us put a name on it.

My story grows because of the relationships around it, and i have no control over that. This story then becomes the aggregation between the parts. I am no longer the forest with each part of my life, each person met, memory, and experience representing a tree, but my own life representing the tree in the forest of humanity. And it doesn’t matter how big the tree is, how many branches it has, how big of a ‘node’ it is, because there is NO centre in the internet.  It is important to realise this because if we don’t we aren’t being network literate. Google isn’t the centre of the internet, it’s just another node; just like Kevin Bacon isn’t the centre of Hollywood, any actor is around three steps away from another.

The egalitarian equation that has been prompted upon the internet makes it that this centre CANNOT exist. Almost everybody’s online presence contains a link between something else, and since we all have a say on the internet, there simply isn’t space for an entity to auto-proclaimed itself the ‘centre’.

Now for an interesting video that shows us the power of individual behaviour, aggregating to collective behaviour.