Book Review: Six Degrees: The science of a connected age
Six Degrees: The science of a connected age
Duncan J. Watts, Norton, 2003
Duncan J. Watts (1971-) is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, head of the CDG Collective Dynamics Group and in 2003 he wrote the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003). He holds a B.Sc in physics from the University of New South Wales, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. In 1998, in conjunction with Steven Strogatz of Cornell University, Watts formalized the small world phenomenon in the celebrated Nature paper. (bron: wiki)
The title of the book is based on the Six Degrees of Separation Theory, it refers to the idea that, if a person is one “step” away from each person he or she knows and two “steps” away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six “steps” away from each person on Earth. You can find lots of links on the Internet with an interest in the Six Degrees Theory, there is even a Six Degrees Hyves.
Duncan Watts takes the reader on a journey through the science of networks and their behavior. He explains this new discipline and its origins in easy and accessible language, taking the reader on a great scientific journey. This book takes a closer look at the Six Degrees phenomenon and many other aspects and implications of it, from economic applications, epidemics, information cascades, cultural fads etc.
Watts first provides the groundwork and the theory behind the study of networks (Chapters 1-5), which introduces some basic graph theory and relations of real world networks to simple mathematical models.
Watts asks himself the following questions: “How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior? (24) “What makes the problem hard, and what makes complex systems complex, is that the parts making up the whole don’t sum up in any simple fashion. Rather they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behavior.”
Watts says that “at least some of the properties of extremely complicated systems can be understood without knowing anything about their detailed structure or governing rules.[…]This is a tremendously hopeful message for anyone interested in understanding the emergent behavior of complex social and economic systems like friendship networks, firms, financial markets, and even societies.” (65)
In chapters six through nine, he deals with epidemics, “the madness of crowds” and the dynamics of adaptation. He closes with views on learnings from recent crises, including the terror attacks of September 11, and with five “lessons for a connected age.”
Overall this is a very good read which I enjoyed reading. The complexity of the theory is understandable throughout the great practical examples. Watts closes with the admission that his book leaves unanswered questions, and the expectation that scientists will keep exploring the new science of networks until they get to the bottom of it … and then keep going.
“…and so it is with science – even when it seems hopeless, we struggle on, because, as with most human ambitions, it is in the struggle that we find the measure of ourselves.”(305)
“Or as Winston Churchill said after the battle of El Alamein in 1942, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” (306)
(This book review is still in progress)
RFID Hackers Camp kicks off at Westergasfabriek, the PICNIC 07 location. With a group of great hackers, designers and engineers the camp aims to bring together creativity, knowledge, and skills from various fields and disciplines to realize innovative and creative uses of RFID technology. Within only five days a number of projects will be created for the approximately 2000 PICNIC visitors carrying around RFID-tagged badges. The projects created will run throughout the conference at various places for people to play with the objects and the objects with them.
The uniformity of the projects lies in a few requirements that emerged form the first brainstorm. First of all, all projects make use of the available RFID tags. Secondly the projects should need no explanation to the audience and should give instant satisfaction. Intuitive and easy to use is an important aim of all projects, because the context is people walking around at the PICNIC conference. It’s a social thing. Thirdly, the projects are focused on social networking. It should support sociality, get people to connect and know each other. It uses and adds to the AnyMeta database, where visitors of PICNIC create a profile page forming the PICNIC network. There aren’t that many mandatory fields in the profile for visitors to fill in, but the database will be filled with new data that is generated during interaction with the projects and other visitors. Social networking becomes a blended physical and digital experience leading into new kinds of hybrid profiles and friendships.
“Emergence – the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software”
Steven Johnson
New York: Scribner, 2001
Are you familiar with the situation in which you’re having a talk over the hedge with that neighbor that emerges from behind it. Whom you never talk to, but suddenly he starts talking about his nephew and his classmate and how that classmate is related to someone that sounds like your 2nd grade teacher. And so on and so on. That pretty much describes the way how Steven Johnson links everything together; slime molds to Manchester, ants to SimCity and neighborhoods to TIVO. And whenever you think you couldn’t care less about how an ant finds the quickest way to the food area, he’ll tell you how to make sense of it all.
The main issue he is trying to get at, is what he calls ’emergence’.
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Scienceblog.com is a blog with scientific articles. I analyse this blog on usability aspects using Jakob Nielsen’s articles Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes and Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. According to Nielsen these are the principles to reach new readers and respect existing reader’s time constraints.
Weblog Usability
1) Author biographies: According to Nielsen users want to know who is the author of the article. On this blog (more…)
In my MA New Media course New Media in practise, blogs are a prominent subject. Besides blogs in general and everything that has to do with the phenomenon blogging we talk a lot about our class blog. In the first two weeks all MA New Media student are encouraged to think about and discuss the mastersofmedia blog which (hopefully) will eventually result in a drastic redesign and new structure which suits the likes of this years MA students.
An aspect of the (more…)
The Flaming Lotus Girls are a San Francisco-based group of female and male artists collaborating all year round to create exceptional fire art and provide a resource for learning metalworking and other essential shop skills. Mother Serpent is a massive skeletal serpent, 165 feet long coiled around her egg. By pushing buttons, spectators can create bigger flames anywhere along the spine. At the rainy opening night at Robodock, Serpent Mother created so much heat causing the rain never touched ground.
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Juist omdat er zoveel verschillende soorten blogs zijn, met ook verschillende onderwerpen, vormen en doelen, hier een vergelijking tussen 5 blogs. [in het nederlands geschreven omdat het [bijna]alleen maar Nederlandse blogs zijn. ] De achterliggende vraag hierbij is of het onderwerp van een blog verschil maakt in de keuze van uiterlijk en indeling. Er is enkel gekeken naar de visuele kant van de blogs en niet de inhoud.
Burorenkema.nl:
– Blog met kritische filmpjes over allerlei onderwerpen.
– Visueel een hele mooie site. Wordt ook heel regelmatig geupdate. Wel op een manier dat het uiterlijk hetzelfde blijft maar met kleine veranderingen.
– Indeling handig. ‘Boven de folt’ altijd het eerste bericht, en hieronder de meest recente andere berichten.
– nadeel: de rechterkant is een beetje vreemd ingedeelt. Het eerste stuk is heel groot ‘van de makers’ en is dus eigenlijk een soort reklame. ‘Dossiers gemist’ is ook vrij groot aanwezig waardoor je minder snel naar de ingezonden stukken kunt, welke toch het meest belangrijk zijn als je andere dingen wilt zien.
– Wel reklame op de site, maar niet heel overdreven waardoor de aandacht van de posts niet wordt afgeleid.
– De comments onder de filmpjes als je er naar gekeken hebt, maar pas best ver naar onderen. Ze nemen veel plaats in ook al zijn het maar korte comments.
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“VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.” (Manuel Lima)
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Brand equals Interface? According to the Information Architects
Frankwatching.com is a blog on news and opinion about digital trends. All sorts of items come by, marketing, gadgets, wiki’s, social software etc. What I try to do in this post is give you a brief analysis of this blog.
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Blogs are increasingly used by not only students, but academics as well. Here, I will analyze the blogs by two academics in the field of media studies; Henry Jenkins and David Bordwell.
Analytical framework
My analytical framework consists of three sections; content, interface, and functionality/tools
For the analysis of the content, I have drawn upon William Kraska’s blogpost, ‘What makes a good blog?’. According to Kraska; focus, personality and reader comments are key to building a successful blog.
Content: focus/personality/reader comments
Starting with Jenkins
Jenkins’blog has a clear focus, and I think that most of the academics intend to stay within their field of knowledge. The focus of the blog is the use of media in popular culture, yet it amounts to a diversified range of topics, from fan culture, gender relations, to analyzing television series.
This gives the reader already an impression of the interests of the blogger. In this case, the personal introduction of the blogger accumulates to this effect (see about Jenkins). The about section seems very strong; it’s divided into the formal qualifications of the blogger e.g. work experience, education, profession; personal interest/hobby; work (published books); and related projects.
Any comments? Yes, at the end of every post, there’s a link to the page where the reader can post a comment. Cons: Most of the blog posts on Jenkins’ site do not have reader’s comments.
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There are a tremendous amount of celebrity gossip weblogs on the internet. One that has caught my attention, because of its different approach towards celebrity gossip, is Ecorazzi.com. This weblog is about celebrity gossip involving the environment and other goodwill activities. To analyse this weblog on its usability and content, it is important to point out what their mission statement is:
Ecorazzi exists as a conduit to report on the latest celebrity gossip as it pertains to activism and inspiring change. The word eco is in our name, but more than the environment is supported by those in the spotlight. We also highlight humanitarian efforts, beneficial campaigns, fundraisers and acts of good. In the spirit of fair play, we’re quick to point how who’s slacking and who’s deserving of recognition.’(1)
Ecorazzi.com started in August 2006 by Michael d’Estries and Rebecca Carter, and has been growing since with members from different cities around the world. They claim that this gives them the ability to cover events and stories first hand, as well as they represent different point of views. (more…)
So does Arvind R initiator of the Creative Criminal weblog. He currently lives in Chennai (formerly known as Madras, located at the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal).
I have found two interesting remarks which (1) could illustrates his point of view and (2) could explane his choice of content.
“Smitten by the creative bug a decade ago, I have been treading the hallowed grounds of advertising ever since. A keenness to broaden my horizons is now making me look towards distant lands.” [Creative Criminal]
And:
“The very point of writing this is to get noticed.” [Creative Criminal]
In this individual blog, he emphasizes the beauty and ugliness of commercials and advertisement. In this post, I am not going to criticize the ethics or aesthetics of commercials and advertisement. I am going to briefly analyse the Creative Criminal weblog, because the idea behind this blog is brilliant, but nevertheless seems to have too many flaws.
My criteria, which I have come across at Problogger.net, are influenced by (1) Timothy Ferriss and (2) Haacked.com of Phil Haack. By analysing the Creative Criminal blog, I can point out its flaws, and thereby help this blog rise to its potential.
- How about the usability? A couple of basic functions are not available that should improve the navigation.
- The search bar is missing, which – in my opinion – is crucial to properly navigate through the blog’s history.
- There is no tag-cloud present, which gives a quick overall view of the content on the blog.
- There is no categorization of the content. It now will take ages to retrieve certain posts.
- What has the upper hand? The Quality or Quantity of postings. Arvind publishes an average of four posts a month. That is not a lot, but the content is always interesting. He has posted several interesting links that lead towards similar, better looking blogs (Frederik Samuel / Adrants / Ads of the world / Adverbox). The reason why I am still ‘a member’ of his blog is simple. According to me, Arvind selects the best content of these blogs, which find their way into his weekly posts. So in terms of content, he is in favour of quality instead of quantity.
- Which blog-tools should have been implemented? And which are not useful? I think he should use another utility, such as WordPress. It currently has no searchbar, tag-cloud or categorization. These basic functions should improve the blog’s usability.
- What are the visual features in this blog? Are there any visual features lacking? Does form follows function? The publisher has chosen not to use a personal logo, which – in my opinion – makes the blog visually less coherent and less recognizable for promotional activities. Every post is based on one or more (motion-) pictures, which are accompanied by text as opposed to text being accompanied by pictures. This decision seems logical considering the subject. So, form follows function…
- What about its literary content? As we look at the content of an average post, the publisher avoids putting forward a proposition. That is why – in my opinion – he is not able to elicit many comments on his posts. I would suggest to end the posts by putting forward clear propositions, in order to trigger comments. He surely wants to generate lots of traffic, because his blog is making use of advertisements.
Now I will end this brief analysis by summing up my suggestions:
- Stop using Google’s Blogger utility
- Insert a search-bar, categorization and a tag-cloud
- Start using a personal logo to make the blog more coherent and more attractive for promotional purposes.
- Elaborate more often on the subject matter and start putting forward propositions to elicit comments.
In a series of events organized around the theme information aesthetics, a collaborative effort between Mediamatic and TAG produced a Salon on Processing.
For those who are not familiar with this phenomenon: Processing is an open-source software platform created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. What it basically comes down to is a platform for visual designers and artists that allows these users to easily access the (often) hazardous and complex world of programming. (because, and I quote Casey; ‘programming is not for geeks, engineers and guys only’). (more…)
Barabási – a physics professor and has build an honourable reputation in the field of network theory -describes two paradigms. A world of a (1) ‘random network theory’ that Paul Erdös and Alfréd Rényi – two mathematical geniuses – have introduced. This is based on the idea that nodes within a network interconnect randomly. According to Barabási, this notion was fallible.
Our tiny robot returned from the Web with a network that was drastically different from the predictions of both [Erdös and Rényi. red] models. It carried home a bunch of […] nodes with an extraordinarily large number of links” [2002:54]
He supported the notion of (2) a network distributed by a ‘power law’ model. Apparently, networks are depending on special nodes. These nodes submerge on the Web (Yahoo, Amazon), telephone networks and social networks (popular people). This breakthrough of using the ‘power law’ distribution in relation to ‘scale free’ networks has brought about new ways of thinking of living organisms, social networks of people and social contacts, economic networks of business relations and terrorist networks.
Barabási is able to express himself in a clear manner, without using difficult jargon or mathematical gibberish. His findings are supported by amusing anecdotes. For example, the ‘six degrees of separation’ gives an interesting inside in the number of connected networks that are necessary to randomly assemble world citizens. I have to face the fact that there are only six networks between myself and someone like president Bush! These findings will keep me informed on network theory.
David Kline and Dan Burstein points out that the blogosphere will transform many areas of politics, business, media and culture. In their book ‘Blog! How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture’ they have interviewed the world’s most influential bloggers. The book contains three parts: Politics & policy, Business & economics and Media & culture. Dan Burstein have written the introduction. Each part is divided in an essay of David Kline, interviews with the bloggers and commentary. It has a good structure and it is not necessary to read the book chronological. The three parts of the book have their own accent.
Potitics & policy
In Politics & policy part stresses the influence of blogs on politics. Kline points out that blogs have influenced the 2004 presidental election. He links it with the public dissatisfaction with the mainstream media. Blogs have the ability to give the public a voice and give a more diverse view. Maybe the mainstream media will give a ‘false balance of objectivity’, as Geneva Overholser points out:: “It leads to a false balance of ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ opinions stories that make the two ‘hand’ appear equal even when the factual weight lies 98 percent on one side.” (9) Or maybe there are more opinions than two. The blogosphere could give these alternative opinions. But, as Erza Klein points out, blogs “encourage polarization and extremism rather than debate and extremism rather than debate and understanding.”
I think the blogosphere could help politics to know what’s really going on in society. Maybe anyone can be a watchdog. Especially for local problems or problems the mainstream media ignores. An example is the Webantenne for the Dutch government. The Dutch government want to listen what citizens needs in society. In stead of deciding what they think best for the country or only going in conversation with the mainstream media, now they want also go in conversation with citizens.
Business & economics
A returning point in the book is that authority is going to change. The one-way politics, business and media are coming to an end. Blogs give people the ability to talk back. In business, the producer/customer boundaries fades. (more…)
Blogosphere can be seen as a new and important element of the new public sphere. On a blog people are able to not only comment on public affairs or read about what they find interesting. On a blog they actually have the possibility to create and manipulate their own, either real or fictive, identity and share it with the world. In doing so they help shape and explore the boundaries and the nature of what could be seen as the new public sphere. “The public sphere, that could be seen as a body of ‘private persons’ assembled to discuss matters of ‘public concern’ or ‘common interest”(according to Habermas in Nancy Fraser pp. 60), takes on new shapes in modern day global communities and according to Michael Keren it is an “important step in the construction of an updated political philosophy on the public/private debate”(Keren pp.10) to look into the way people post their live stories or interests on a day to day basis as a component of the public domain.
Although the need for exploration of the blogosphere is made clear by Keren in his introduction he also warns his readers for the possible problems that this exploration will face. Because of the diversity of blogosphere it is almost impossible to characterize the public domain arising in this new medium. There are thousands and thousands of web logs circulating on the internet owned by thousands and thousands of different people who all have their different motives to start a blog and different interests to write about. The blogosphere consists of a seemingly endless amount of links the information flow is hard to follow because of the size and diversity. To give a clear cut overview of the public domain arising on “the blogoshere” is almost impossible. The author has no choice butt to be satisfied with giving only a handful of examples of early twenty-first century identities. (more…)
De Belastingdienst, de NS, minister Rouvoet, Google, De Nederlandsche Bank, Schiphol, Maurice de Hond, Mark Rutte, het voorstel implementatie bewaarplicht verkeersgegevens, de plannen voor het Elektronisch Kinddossier, het voorstel nieuwe bevoegdheden voor de AIVD en het PNR Data Agreement zijn dit jaar door de jury van de Big Brother Awards genomineerd voor een Award.
Met de Awards worden personen, bedrijven, overheden en voorstellen te kijk gezet die het afgelopen jaar bij uitstek controle op burgers en inbreuken op privacy hebben bevorderd. In iedere categorie wordt op vrijdag 21 september 2007 één winnaar bekendgemaakt tijdens de openbare uitreiking om 20:00 in De Balie te Amsterdam.
Friday 21st of September, 20:00h @ de Balie, Amsterdam.
This book is a bundle of theories and case studies which Surowiecki uses to convince the reader that a diverse crowd can come up with better answers and solutions than a single group of experts.
The cases he brings forth vary between downright obvious and fantastically revealing examples. For instance the story about cascades, in which people tend to follow other people merely on the fact that if they think it’s good, it will be worthwhile for me. It’s something we experience everyday: if a restaurant is empty, we will not go there because the food might be awful. Same with the internet and computer applications, if everyone uses Google and Microsoft Powerpoint those have to be pretty good applications, but it does not mean they are best suited for you, it means that they are generally the best options for the majority of the crowd.
In his book ‘We the Media: Grassroots journalism by the People’, Dan Gilmor describes the development in the so called grassroots journalism. Gilmors goal is:
“[…]to persuade you that the collision of journalism and technology is having major consequences for three constituencies: journalists, newsmakers, and the audience.”
The book can roughly be divided into three parts. First Gilmor gives an overview of the developments in the new media area, leading up to now. The second part consists of an overview of the possibilities existing within the current new media. Not only does he give examples in which the opportunities offered by new media become clear, he also shows examples in which somethings didn’t work out quite the way it was expected. These cases can also be very useful for anyone wanting to participate in the new media developments so hopefully these pitfalls can be avoided. The last part of the book is dedicated to the future of new media. Gilmor doesn’t speculate too much. He is quite aware of the unexpected ways in which new media has developed in the last couple of years.
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This summer I was part of the Digital Methods Initiative, a summer school program that aims to contribute to doing research into the “natively digital”. One of the projects I participated in was: Diagnosing the Condition of Iraq: The web view. The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi (2003), is a nice case to both broaden and ground this research.
The blog ‘Where is Raed?’, from which the book The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi draws most of its content, is a personal account by Salam Pax, a pseudonym of a (at the time of writing) Baghdad based Iraqi. I came relatively late to his ‘Where is Raed?’ blog; the war had already started and the blog was already featured in Wired magazine, when I found out about it through a random blogroll. In his book (and blog) Salam describes his daily lives; his love for Bjork and Massive Attack and his preparations and encounters in the war, starting 6 months before the war and proceeding four months into the actual war. While the overall responses to his blog have been widely varied, ranging from disbelieve and anger to encouragement, to me, the most striking was how much I could relate to his writings. Salam writes about the same music I listen to and uses a somewhat cynical humor I can appreciate. This book is therefore a valuable first hand account on the way an Iraqi man experienced the build up to the war and the war itself.
Real time, cyber time, machine time, clock time, chronos time, frankentime, mythic time, objective time, natural time, subjective time, present time, timeless time, being time, bullet time, internet time, chronoscopic time, global standard time, local time…are you still there? 24/7, Time and Temporality in The Network Society (Robert Hassan and Ronald E. Purser, Stanford Business Books 2007), is a lovely thought provoking anthology about refllections on time and space in the networked society.
This work moves easily across diverse ranges of subjects, from the philosophical, mathematical, cultural, and political to personal, zenbuddhistic and social, with references to – among others – Castells, Baudrillard, Brian Eno, Dynasty, the Matrix, Bourdieu, Manovich, Borges and off course a lot of Paul Virillio.
Like Bill Spinhoven’s Time Stretcher, developed in 1988, which visualizes the impact of time on space while blurring your vision along the way, this book tries to stretch your mind in all its different directions. The general division can be made along the bias of the technological and the personal. On one side it handles the impact of repercussions of the rate of change in rapidly accelerating modern life and its influences on modern society. On the other hand it researches the mathematical background of technological functions as for example the Viterbi Algorithm.
This is a review of Henry Jenkins’ book Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory culture (2006). Henry Jenkins is the co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers is a compilation of several essays, including his previous work on fandom, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992).
The introduction of the book is entitled as the confession of ACA/fan, which already gives away Jenkins’ personal interest in fandom. Jenkins is certainly not the first scholar whose work centered on fandom, but is one of the few who took fandom seriously, even within the context of science and knowledge. What makes his work stand out in comparison to previous studies on fandom is that his work captures fans’ experience as a source for active participation in producing meaning. Rather seeing fans (or audience) as passive recipients of the media texts, Jenkins argues that fans like “poachers” occupy someone else’s property and adapt/alter it to suit their own taste. This approach provides a useful insight into the position of fans in relation to media text, which as Jenkins emphasizes, is not one-way streamed. This also means that corporate media hegemony is contested by the consumers of the texts, and that meaning of the text is not a top-down dictation, but rather a constructive one that requires fans’ participation and input.
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Joe Trippi – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Trippi was the campaign manager of Howard Dean, a Democratic candidate for the American presidency from the beginning of 2003 untill january 2004. In his book he writes about the campaign and the use of the internet, according to him the best instrument to make politics more democratic.
Trippi’s text is truly American. Now you may say that such a thing is logical because it is a truly American subject and I agree, however, what I am getting at is the emotional and patriotic way Trippi talks to his fellow Americans.
The Dean campaign was meant for all Americans but the way he talks about the Republicans can be called everything but tactful and objective. They are Trippi’s scapecoat about which he sometimes talks in negative one-liners.
In my opinion the political part of this book has been written by three different personalities of Trippi. The first wants to give an objective story about the campaign he was running. His second personality wants the Democrats to win the race of the presidential elections* and besides that to gain at least a moderatly positive view of the Democratic Party. the third person of Trippi, and least ‘in control’ of them all, I encountered while reading this book, was the one who tried to burn down all Republican thoughts. At times I detected a manner of political banter to match that of Micheal Moore in the way he tries to bring down the opposite party.