Networks
See also Systems Thinking, Big History and Counter-History, also Datavisualization
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 Barabási book Linked: is about How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. (excerpts): Intro, 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. **** 2002 BookTV 2009 talk (Q&A video). See his TEDtalks. 2002 talk on Tipping Point book.
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. BigThink videos: Social capital, slime molds, chemistry of social networks and more.
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.
Kevin Bacon TED talk; Kevin Bacon Six Degrees game; Oracle of Bacon. I work with Rich I. who works with Tjaden who met KB on Jon Stewart, so your Bacon # is 4.
== Technological Networks == (see also Counter-Culture)
My Dynamic map of counter-culture is rogue version of James Burke's Knowledge Web
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 ***
Johnson corroborated: 3 Dangerous Myths about Innovators and Creators by Tim Sanders (BigThink video).
THE MASTER SWITCH: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires By Tim Wu summary review. Extensive video talk.
The Seventh Sense Joshua Cooper Ramo video discussion (with Malcolm Gladwell) Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances. What if they were all connected? 2016.
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
Cell Phones
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.
Smartphone Detox: How To Power Down In A Wired World. 2/18.
Networks of outrage and hope : social movements in the Internet age by Castells, Manuel Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2012. McH Stacks HM851 .C369 2012 also online permalink
Fake News propagated by social networks) (interactive graphic, in-depth article.
If you grew up poor, your college degree may be worth less PBS Newshour 3/16.
Malcolm Gladwell,“Small Change—Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” The New Yorker, Oct. 4, 2010.
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.
How to Fund your Dream: Kevin Kelley argues "The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches. But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist’s works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales. Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail? One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.
Privacy/ Big Data
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.audio interview Letters and Politics - March 24, 2015 at 10:00am.
Eric Berlow overview?
Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ review, extensive video interview.
