Reading Notes #4

In “The Connected Age”, Duncan Watts discussed several different types of networks. He presented the power grid as a vast network that might possibly be the “most essential technological feature of the modern world”. The problem with the power grid, and also many other networks, is that the individual behaviors of the components are known, but the collective behavior of the group is not. This is a problem that continues to boggle the minds of many scientists, mathematicians, and other professionals. A general consensus is that the individual parts don’t connect in a simple fashion, and that this process is very complicated. On the other hand, complete systems’ behaviors can sometimes be predicted without knowing the behaviors of the individual parts. Watts also discusses the dynamic nature of networks. They are not fixed, and change with time and the world in which they operate. An interesting topic that they discussed was one of “clustering”. This is the idea that most people’s friends are also friends of each other. This coincides with the “small world” idea. I cannot agree more with this concept. I cannot count the number of times I have been at a get together or in a class and discover that we have mutual friends. This is actually one of the aspects I love most about the UW. This “small world” feel makes the population seem a lot smaller than 40,000 students. What is clear is that networks lack structure, are adaptive and ever-changing, and are still a puzzle to many who study them.