9th Symposium : Watts and Barabási

I enjoyed the symposium from yesterday, It is very clarifying and make my head less spin. Previous symposium always answers question but in the end generates more confusion than the actual getting answers. But Yesterday symposium is much easier to understand as the tutors explained how they take the reading and how they interpreted it.

For example the Duncan Watts reading, each of the tutor explain which paragraph they found most fascinating. The first is Elliot, he finds that network is important as a whole and focuses as a whole rather than the individual parts. Though I still have to figure out by what did he mean by “Cognition as an Abstraction.”

Jason’s parts is the one i understood the most I guess. He used the example of a race (human race) and also explained the basic idea how parts interact with one another to create a complex system. He wanted to point out that network literacy doesn’t always associate with technology and internet and that it could spread out to biology, and so on. For me this is an eye-opening, ever since we started this course, my head has been wrapped around the assumption that network=technology and I forgot that there are more to things than what it seems.

Betty discussed how individual behavior aggregated toward a collective behavior. The application for network and how it work. For there to be a network you need an internet and a level of connectivity. She also mentioned how cultural activity might also access or maybe give some aspect to the technology…

Last but not least is Adrian take on the reading. His explanations similar but deeper and more condensed. He explains that it is more toward the relation of parts and not just the part itself and also giving an explanation of how network is similar to ecology. In ecology you need a variety of things from the animals, plants, water, earth, and all that parts to form a structure and a pattern and there is no hierarchy is the structure (We are not talking about the hierarchy of food chain but rather to the structure of it, no part is less important than the other, every part is essential and is needed). He draws  it toward hos blog and blog post is similar, there is no hierarchy in it and each of the parts interlink and made a sort of network.

I think the symposium is much better done this way so we can discuss the reading further and actually got some sort of conclusion in it.

(Image by Leszek Glasner taken from allthingsd)