Defining a Network

In class on Tuesday, in response to Mark C. Taylor’s chapter from The Moment of Complexity, we tried to categorize different types of writing into either “grid” or “network.” Initially, one would think that academic writing, what I always think of as English essays or research papers, belongs under grid because it follows Taylor’s definition of an assembly line: “Separate individuals, entities, and events are joined in a predictable chain where effects are proportional to causes” (Taylor 29). In order to produce a piece of academic writing, the author must follow certain guidelines and the paper is almost always organized in the same way. However, especially if one looks at research papers, it is difficult to say that academic writing belongs only in the “grid” category. For one, several people might contribute to a paper, either through writing or editing, or references could be added to the end, which can be considered “network” attributes.

It is easy to classify non-traditional writing, such as blogs and wikis, as belonging to the “network” category, because they often seem so different from academic writing. The fact that they contain links to other people or other sites is what sets them apart. However, blogs and wikis still have a certain form, and they usually have to follow grammatical guidelines. Should they also be considered grid-like?

I think that we should just forget about trying to categorize writing as either grid or network because there is no clean break. However, I think that looking at the idea of emergence, brought up by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees, is a good way to determine what could be considered a network. Watts says that “emergence” comes about when “the interactions of individuals in a large system can generate greater complexity than the individuals themselves display, and sometimes much less” (Watts 27). In class, it was brought up that neurons working together in the brain, or the expression of several genes to create a functioning organism, are examples of where emergence is happening. Individual behavior aggregates to collective behavior, without one individual standing out as the leader. Maybe I just like this idea of emergence because there was a way to tie genetics into it, and I’m a genetics major, but I think that it really shows the importance of the idea of a network.

If you look specifically at blogging in this class, my individual post is connected to the posts of everyone else, and all of our separate ideas come together in the network in hopes of obtaining a higher level of understanding. This would not happen in a regular English class where all of our assignments would be turned in directly to the instructor. Let’s just hope that our network can create “greater complexity,” that Watts wrote about, instead of something “less.”