It's all about who you know...

I had never heard of the “Keep Austin Weird” campaign until class on Tuesday, but I find it really interesting. I’m all for keeping the integrity of small towns, but I also love the fact that when I’m at home, I have my choice of three Targets in short driving distance. In my hometown, despite the fact that we have two Starbucks a block away from each other and a Subway right next to a Quizno’s, there was a heated debate over whether or not a Borders should be opened. The fear was that it would out-compete a locally owned bookstore. Personally, I wanted the Borders because I don’t like the locally owned bookstore—it’s over-priced and they wouldn’t offer me a summer job.

Anyways, I think that the PowerPoint presentations we made really highlighted the importance of connections in a network. In Austin, it was very beneficial to the people who were starting off the campaign to have a lot of important connections. Without those connections, they would not have been able to spread the word or expose their merchandise, such as the bumper stickers. The use of the internet was definitely a catalyst in the spread of the network because, without it, it would have taken a very long time to gain support for “Keep Austin Weird.”

Although those Texans were able to use connections for a good cause, Albert-Laszlo’ Barabási mentioned several negative outcomes of living in such a highly connected society in his book, “Linked: The New Science of Networks.” Barabási looks at the example of how the spread of HIV in North America was partly due to the promiscuity of one man, Gaetan Dugas. Barabási uses the term, “hub” to describe Duga’s role in the HIV “network” since he seemed to have spread the virus through over 2,500 sexual connections.

Barabási compares the spread of HIV to the spread of computer viruses through e-mail. Once a virus hits a hub, or a person that has a ton of links in their address book, the virus can be spread to hundreds, and then thousands of computers. It is for this reason that it is difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of even the least contagious viruses.

I think that it is kind of scary how fast anything from a simple e-mail to a fatal virus can be spread today. It is also scary to think that you don’t really have control over what networks you belong to. I have no control over who puts my e-mail or screenname in their address book or buddy list. Also, I have no way of knowing if one of my “connections” could be considered a hub in a network. I think that we are so quick to assume that being so highly connected as a good thing, but I never really thought of the consequences until I read Barabási.

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.”