The Watts reading was a little bit difficult to understand, it made use of a complex analogy with the electric grid system in America and how its failure caused widespread panic to relate to social networks.

I think the most important part of the reading (or maybe the part i understood best) was the discussion of the “Small-World Problem”. Watts discusses the six degrees of separation and how if each person knows a hundred others, by the sixth degree, you are able to reach 9 billion people. The only setback is that maybe 70 of my friends might also be friends of my best friend, which means that the degrees are actually much more complex, with people intertwined with each other all over the place. This is where the problem begins to surface; the more we know our friends, the less we know the rest of the world, and the more our friends know us, the less we can reach out to the rest of the world through them.

The matrix of networks such as internet and especially hypertext is a lot like this web of friendships and connections, never ending and extremely complex. And what happens if one of the electric lines breaks down? Well someone out there isn’t getting any electricity… What a shame!