Category: Articles & Chapters

ABSTRACT:  In his book, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi gives us a detailed analysis of the typology of the WWW.  In so doing, he makes many errors from which we can derive important lessons about ways not to study the WWW or complex networks in general.  These lessons are crucial from the point of view of the philosophy of science, and suggest that more care and reflecivity is called for in pursuing WWW research.  This paper is intended to provided imputus for meaningful thought and further discussion.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Quality and Quantity

Network Analysis (Analytical Dimensioins of Networks, Robot Typology, Network Density, Assessing the Value of Hubs and Non-Hubs, The Effect of Search Engines on Typology)

Static Quality (Proportional Linkage, Website Design, Valuable Referrers, The Effect of Closeness)

Dynamic Quality (The Myth of Fitness, Competition is Cooperation, Survival of the Fitters, Innovation Changes the Landscape, Limits to Growth, Alternative Norms to Preferential Treatment

Conclusion: Getting It Right

33 Page PDF

ABSTRACT:  The Information Revolution combined with connective technologies creates a unique global social network.  This network is vulnerable to cascades of information, norms, and coordinated action.  The inherent unpredictability of the information society demands new kinds of governance that focus on rapid network-coordinated response over centralized predictive planning.

CORE QUOTE:  “Power, as the capacity to impose behavior, lies in the networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social actors, institutions, and cultural movements.”  Citing M. Castells, End of Millenium (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 379.

Six Page PDF

Summary:  The rigid hierarchy that characterizes state bureaucracies has also been embedded into internaitonal institutions, and it is this architecture that can be vastly improved by restructuring it into a multiscale network.  There are both descriptive and prescriptive reasons for doing so: 1) increases in functional efficiency and robustness, and 2) improvements from a normative perspective.  As we enter the 21st century, the international system already exhibits many aspects of multiscale networks, but there are typically seen as liabilities and not assets.  By providing a richer understanding of multiscale networks, this paper proposes an alternative to Cox's “with them or against them” ultimatum.