Networks

See also Systems Thinking, Big History and Counter-History

This page is about theory and practice of Networks

Six Degrees of Separation

James Burke's fantastic Connections television series. James Burke's Knowledge Web pulls all the content into a visual surfable web.

Dynamic visual online six degree map includes UCSC and Buckminster Fuller, Beat Poets who were into Zen Buddhism and other forms of altering consciousness.

Albert-László BarabásiLinked: is about How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. (excerpts) Six Degrees; Matthew Effect (rich get richer).

Who rules the world? James Glattfelder studies complexity: how an interconnected system — say, a swarm of birds — is more than the sum of its parts. And complexity theory, it turns out, can reveal a lot about how the economy works. Glattfelder shares a groundbreaking study of how control flows through the global economy, and how concentration of power in the hands of a shockingly small number leaves us all vulnerable. TEDtalk. 1/15.

Duncan Watts Six Degrees book overview (5 min video).

Case Study: The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin. Illustrates serendipity and social networks.

Malcolm Gladwell has written several interesting books on innovation and networks, especially The Tipping Point. **** See his TEDtalks.

Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community."(video interview) (2000).

Nicholas Christakis (see his book below) explores how the large-scale, face-to-face social networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact, for example predict epidemics. TEDtalk video. Related: obesity study.

Connecting to Change the World: HARNESSING THE POWER OF NETWORKS FOR SOCIAL IMPACT by Peter Plastrik, Madeleine Taylor, and John Cleveland (published by Island Press, go Slugs). 2014. see Entrepreneurship.

Technological Networks (see also Counter-Culture)

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution 2014 by Walter Isaacson (also bios on Franklin and Jobs). He dispels lone genius myth, highly recommended *** video interview. (other interviews).***

RadioLab's The Trust Engineers: Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior; Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. And along the way we can’t help but wonder whether that’s possible, or even a good idea. (audio) 3/15.

Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web. TEDtalk. 4 min summary of book ideas. summary of Where Good Ideas Come From. New PBS series We Got to Now, companion book highly recommended ***

THE MASTER SWITCH: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires By Tim Wu summary review. Extensive video talk.

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2, 000 Years Tom Standage 2013. Talk at Google(video).

Using Networks to Make Predictions (video) Santa Fe Inst.

Who Are the Hackers? TEDtalks. The Secret History Of Hacking (Discovery Channel video, Kevin Mitnick, Captain Crunch, Steve Wozniak).

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Steven Levy - 25th Anniversary Edition.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (summary) by John Markoff Google book.

The Virtual Community by digital pioneer Howard Rheingold (2012 UC Regent lecture on social networks for peer education). His Tools for Thought traces the development of technology to augment our minds (vs our bodies), including the first programmer Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who worked with Charles Babbage. Also, Cybernetics, as well as Doug Engelbart. Ted Nelson wrote the Computer Liberation manifesto that inspired hackers, and envisioned a better WWWeb that was never built.

Doug Engelbart (short bio) essentially invented the computer (see what is still called The Mother of All Demos in 1958 (short video overview)), though his vision of augmenting our Collective IQ to deal with the "wickedly complex" problems we face has not yet been realized. 2006 biographical interview (1 hr 15 min).

Secret History of Silicon Valley by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. Unbeknownst to even seasoned inhabitants, today's Silicon Valley had its start in government secrecy and wartime urgency (video).

Pirates of Silicon Valley (Documentary) is probably derivative of

Triumph of the Nerds (video) (website with transcript and links). 1996 video. Triumph of the Nerds. sequel: Nerds 2.0.1: Networking the Nerds: brief history of the Internet.

Social Networks: one of the smartest and long-standing researchers on digital technology is Sherry Turkle at MIT, the US #1 technology school. Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (review); 2012 TEDtalk; (video interview); extensive talk @ Google.

Facebook’s former employee, Katherine Losse The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network, reveals how Facebook as a company was highly sexist.

Privacy

Generation Like includes greatMerchants of Cool correspondent Douglas Rushkoff. PBS Frontline video documentary.

CQ Researcher Reports: Social Media Explosion 1/13 See also Oct. 25, 2013 Big Data and Privacy Aug. 30, 2013 Government Surveillance Jan. 25, 2013 Social Media Explosion

Data and Goliath Democracy Now video 3/15. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist. His latest book, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. He’s a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.