This weeks reading by Duncan Watts looks at the idea of networking. Not just networking as we think of it today, but the science or mathematics behind it also.

Watts begins by looking at a major power outage that occurred throughout America in 1977. He states that it was identified that a major reason for the outage occurred because of a lack of understanding about the interdependencies that were present within the system.

He then continues to talk about individual behaviour and how it aggregates to collective behaviour then moves on to networks. Watts states that a network is nothing more than a collection of objects connected to each other in some fashion, but proceeds to declare a true definition of networks is too difficult to describe. He also examines how human interactions exist in a network and compares the rules that govern individual behaviour to that of a mob.

Watts also talks about how networks are not a new idea, they have been around since 1736 and were studying in a mathematical sense.

He proceeds to identify two key qualities that make up a network, interestingly Adrian also looks at these two points, the first being the concept that networks represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something, the second, that networks are constantly changing and evolving.

I also found it interesting how Watts talks about using human relationships to form a mathematical equation. Although by this point I am completely lost, this thought did intrigue me slightly.

Finally Watts looks at the concept of the ‘Small World Problem’ and the idea of ‘Six Degree’s of Separation’. Most people are familiar with this concept and it was interesting to read how Stanley Milgram originally conducted the experiment. I did think, that if someone tried to conduct this experiment today they would have serious issues as most of the letters would be thrown away, thinking it was some kind of spam mail.

Overall a very confusing read as it zig zagged all over the place. But I guess it was just all about different kinds of networks, which makes sense.