A small part of the internet. Photo: Cesar Harada

After learning about the 80/20 rule in Business Management during VCE I was fascinated with the seemingly magical equation that is very relatable to a lot of areas of life. The rule is important to business matters, mathematical studies (Maths methods, another fantastic part of the VCE curriculum – good riddance), and the all powerful network. I guess I was exposed to it regularly in high school as a result of these sorts of classes making up the bulk of my curriculum.

I also find network structures interesting and enjoy the strand of thought that goes along with them. Here’s something I posted back at the start of my blogging career.

Adrian’s rough equation that the rule applies to the blogging makes sense too. It ties right back into power and the world, society, economics, whatever you want to call it. There is always power inequalities in the world. I guess the fact that countries like America manage to have some of the richest people in the world, as well as the poorest contributes to this. It’s a natural sort of structure and hierarchy that humans have become a part of.

And so the relevance of this in regard to the network, (apart from all the obvious links and connotations) is that to have power in the network, you need to be part of the 20. The more links to your blog, website, business, or whatever property you own on the network there are, the more power you have over the network’s economy. The more connections there are to your node, the more relative control you have. I say relative because you cannot control the network. The network is its own being. But you can certainly help shape it to an extent. If you put something out there that’s worthwhile, people will resonate with it, learn from it, refer to it, link to it. All of a sudden, you become a power node. Instead of a link from your Mum to your blog, suddenly there are millions of people, website and organisations interacting with your node in the network.

Back to the big picture, as Barabási notes in Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, the prominence of complex structures and power relations in systems such as the network, yield to a new kind of order. While in some applications, such as economical inequality, the 80/20 rule can be indicative of a negative system, for a intricately designed web of nodes such as the network, the power balance is important. It gives the network a way in which to organise itself, it makes it understandable and accessible.