This weeks reading, The Connected Age, talked about networks and how the individual components of these networks interact.

Networks were defined as being a collection of separates ‘that are actually doing something’. They are dynamic, evolving in response to these individual doings and therefore ‘what happens and how it happens will depend on networks’.

The author observed networks in a variety of things – power systems, crickets, joggers – and talked about synchronisation. How we may extrapolate collective actions from individual behaviour, and how we may be able to do the opposite – how we can predict the action of mobs without knowing the particulars of singular components within the mob.

He mentioned power outages that occurred in America due to the excessive and simultaneous use of electricity during summer. There was discussion about how crickets chirp in a synchronised fashion, and the authored pondered ‘who was listening to who’. He also gave an example of joggers and how the extent of their awareness to each other will change how they run, and sychronise.

What caught my eye the most, and found the most understandable was the last part of the reading which discussed Milgram’s small world and the six degrees finding. How people who were distant could be close through an average of six steps was surprising for me. It made me think whether that could still be applied today. Since the internet is so accessable nowadays, will that theory become obsolete? If we think about online profiles on Facebook or even this blog; it’s on the Web, ready to be accessed by anyone. It reminds me of McLuhans term ‘global village’, people around the world who have no mutual friends, nothing in common (other than the fact they reside on the net) can contact each other virtually. There is no need for the ‘someone chain’ either.