Here are some ideas from the week 8 readings:
“MY PART IN THIS STORY BEGAN, AS MANY STORIES DO, MORE OR less by accident, in a small town in upstate New York called Ithaca. And a place named after the mythical home of Odysseus is, I suppose, as good a place to begin a story as any. Back then, however, the only Odysseus I knew was a small cricket, who along with his brothers Prometheus and Hercules was part of an experiment I was running as a graduate student at Cornell University with my adviser, Steven Strogatz. Steve is a mathematician, but pretty early on in his career he started to become much more interested in the applications of mathematics to problems in biology, physics, and even sociology than in the math itself.”
In one of his paragraphs, Duncan J Watts demonstrated, with subtlety, an example of social networks. The end of his previous sentences is directly connected to the start of the next, hinting at the six degrees of connection. He also describes his involvement in the story as an ‘accident’. Knowing now that there is no such thing as random network or accidents, Watts choice of words plays cleverly on the very nature of networks.