Alex is a bit mind boggled by one of Barabasi’s quotes about the 80/20 rule. ‘Millions of web page creators work together in some magic way to generate a complex web that defies the random universe’. The Barabasi reading talked about internet being a random universe and therefore needing to abide by the rules of the bell curve, which it doesn’t. I think Alex is just confused (and understandably so) about how the internet, with all its few ‘powerful’ nodes and millions of not so powerful nodes can detract so well from a system that already defines most of the universe: the bell curve. Michael revels at the discussion of the bacon number and how densely connected networks can be. I think it’s important to note however that the Bacon number is just an example to instantiate just how dense these networks really can be. It was done with Erdos in the past, and can be done with any celebrity, Kevin bacon isn’t some kind of Hollywood landmark (maybe to some). Seonaid talks about the discussion on egalitarianism on the web during the symposium. She reckons that this ‘utopian vision’ of the web, as she puts it, cannot be achieved. Nevertheless, with hypertext, she likes to think that if your content is engaging enough, people will link to it, doubling your chances of someone else reading it, and so on, which is always a nice way to look at things when it comes to scale-free networks.

Following last week’s symposium, Alex leaned more toward Adrian’s perspective on the use of the word narcissism as inaccurate to describe bloggers and the blogging practice. She believes the words are too harsh and says that human emotion isn’t always 100% apparent online. Michael agrees, saying that services such as FaceBook are full of narcissist comments and posts. He reckons that some of the features are only a reflection of people’s desire to be noticed by their friends. Seonaid makes use of an interesting image to convey the meaning behind technological determinism as discussed in the Potts and Murphie reading.