I’m just going to say that my first impression of this reading is that the author seems like a bit of a dick. I believe that people can be over-reliant on technology, but I don’t know if I like this guy’s attitude. Anyway.

Luckily it gets better, and I really enjoyed the story about New York’s blackout. If all electricity just disappeared, I don’t know if I could survive. My laptop would last for five hours, my tablet a day or two, and my phone a couple of days too. Not to mention all the other things, like kettles and washing machines and heaters and air conditioners.

In any case, I’m not a big science person. I enjoy science, but I’m not good at it. That’s why I found this both interesting and challenging. It’d be interesting to compare the use of electricity in America versus the use of electricity in South Africa. They rotate the flow of electricity so some parts of the city are out for periods of time. I know that the electricity story is just something to facilitate the discussion of connected systems and how single components in larger systems interact altogether. It’s kind of like when I’m in a network of friends, everyone else kind of gravitates to each other, but I end up alone…anyway.

How does individual behaviour aggregate to collective behaviour?

These rhetorical questions were pretty interesting, and obviously ones that people are trying to crack (especially re: new ideas becoming crazes. I say make everything yo-yos. Yo-yos are great).

This got more and more scientific as it went on, so my degree of understanding went sort of like this…

The wonders of Google Drive.

By the end, I was even less interested, especially in his anecdotes. No offence to Dunc, who I’m sure is a swell guy. I feel as though having a passing idea of the topic would definitely make his anecdotes more interesting, as would caring about him in any way. The historical stories are much more interesting.

I wonder what Duncan thinks of Facebook.