I know that lately I have been slacking off with my blog, because I honestly can’t find the motivation to write more with all of the essays I have had to do for other subjects. I feel like all I have been doing is read…then write…and repeat. Not enough creating stuff. But I digress.
This week’s readings is less direct with its subject in comparison to the past ones about pre-internet and the hypertext. The author takes on the concept of networking beyond the level that we have been currently stagnant on. But since blog posts aren’t created to be essay-length, one could place emphasis on three ideas that the author touches upon in his piece.
First off, the networking system is relayed as a process of interconnection, that is, a majority of efforts working together to produce a powerful impact. The example given is to that of a country’s electricity, with which the failure of a single fuse could corrupt a tri-state and cost billions of dollars in damage.
Secondly, the author analyses the concept of synchrony, somewhat a variation from a more familiar synchronisation, understood as the “simple and well-defined version of emergence.”
Lastly, is the “six degrees of separation,” which the author himself was particularly unaware of until prior to his writing the piece. And no, this is not an allusion to a song by The Script. The idea introduced is that we are all connectable to everyone within six cycles of people’s relations. The author claims that everyone knows someone who knows someone (after three more) who knows a particular person, in his example the president. This is where the term “a small world” comes from, familiar to social events when recognition prevails in the strangest places.
These ideas gives me the impression that we, as humans, are small in the complex, tangled web of the world we live in. Our bodies, made up of sophisticated systems that even the most proficient of researchers are incapable of fully comprehending, are only cogs in the intensity of the machinery that is life. The human brain, with all its intangible emotions and cognitive processes are a part of an infinite cycle of networks, which we could never understand in our lifetime. It makes me wonder if the only way we could truly live, after all, is if we challenge the conformity of the system we are born into. Perhaps I am getting much too ideological with all these concepts and have strayed too far away from the take-away…but this is mine.