"New information technologies, by transforming all processes of information processing, act upon all domains of human activity, and make it possible to establish endless connections between different domains, as well as between elements and agents of such activities."



Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society 1996, 2000. p78



A change in the technology of linking leads to a change in the network. Exactly how of course depends on many things. The technology of linking (or, the means of communication and transport -- that should cover the universe of interactions between nodes shouldn't it?) has a deterministic (but not predictive) affect on the network. In the case of speeding up, cheapening (i.e. an economic metaphor for allowing more links to develop), "network behaviors" can emerge that before were impossible, or smothered, dormant, potential. That is, emergent behaviors.



A change in the technology of linking also allows a re-architecting of the network. E.g. links can be thrown across the network without going through the old hubs (gateways, filters, editors, censors).



In biological processes, the linking technology might be chemical exchanges, sound waves, electrical signals (that wd include touch in the final analysis? or if not, touch), etc. In human society, what we think of as communication and transportation technology (see the chapter Michael Stack and I did on digitalization: The Digital Advantage for more).



For language -- what is the networking technology of language? Words link in specific ways -- syntactical or grammatical rules. Some words, as I think Barabasi points out, function as super-connectors (or, if you mapped out the usage of words, they fall into a power law distribution, the signature of a network architecture). This may be trivial and irrelevant, but I suppose if the syntactical rules or grammatical rules were changed -- the means by which words link, that you would have a change, perhaps profound, in the language.



The relationship, and the nature of the relationship, between the technology of linking and the nature of the network is an analog to Marx's fundamental observation that productive relations must correspond to productive forces.

appropriating the internet for global activism from Yes! magazine:



"Nearly all activists use the Internet for e-mail and websites. But only a few have begun to harness the full power of the emerging networked world."



jd

Here's another disease-related item. This one is from Mike Davis, author of among other things City of Quartz, maybe the best book ever written about Los Angeles. The spread of disease highlights the network-ness of human relationships. Human beings are the nodes, the links are the contacts through which pathogens spread (the proximity to sneezes, sexual contacts, shared items, etc -- all mediated social connections). As Mike D.'s article shows, there is a definite class-dimension to the nature of the network.



A Deadly Plague of Slums



Here are some excerpts:



"Mass death soon may be coming to a neighborhood near you, and the Department of Homeland Security will be helpless to prevent it. The terrorist in this case will be a mutant offspring of influenza A subtype H5N1: the explosively spreading avian virus that the World Health Organization (WHO) worries will be the progenitor of a deadly global plague.



...



"But a true pandemic would probably overwhelm the world long before a vaccine could be developed and produced in large quantities. The potential accelerators of a new plague are the huge slums of Asia and Africa. Concentrated poverty, indeed, is one of the most important variables in any model of how a pandemic might grow.



"The bustees of Kolkata, the chawls of Mumbai, the kampungs of Jakarta, or the katchi abadis of Karachi are, from an epidemiological standpoint, landscapes saturated in gasoline, only awaiting an errant spark like H5N1. (Twenty million or more of the deaths in 1918-19 were in poor, congested and recently famished parts of British India.)



...



"During the debt crisis of the 1980s, the IMF, backed by the Reagan and Bush administrations, forced most of the third world to downsize public employment, devalue currencies and open their domestic markets to imports. The results everywhere were an explosion of urban poverty and sharp fall-offs in public services.



"A principal target of IMF austerity programs has been urban public health. In Zaire and Ghana, for instance, "structural adjustment" meant the laying off of tens of thousands of public health workers and doctors. Similarly in Kenya and Zimbabwe, implementation of IMF demands led to huge fall-offs in healthcare coverage and spending.



...



"Thanks to global neo-liberalism, then, disease surveillance and epidemic response are weakest precisely where they are most important: in the mega-slums of Asia and Africa. That's where the brushfire of H5N1 could turn into a deadly biological firestorm.



"In that event, it would consume more than just the poor. Once a new pandemic had acquired the momentum of mass mortality in Asia it would inexorably spread to North America and Europe. It would easily climb the walls of gated communities and other fortresses of privilege.



"Here, of course, is the rub. In the past, the rich countries, with few exceptions, have shown callous indifference to the monstrous human toll of AIDs in Africa or of the two million poor children annually claimed by malaria. H5N1 may be our unexpected reward. "

Mad cow disease highlights an interesting dimension of networks (or processes, which can be viewed through the lens of network science). This was prompted after reading an interview with John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, authors of Mad Cow, USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, from 1998(!).



Economies, or sectors of the economies, can be seen as networks of buyers and sellers. The production process is a circuit of connections between suppliers, producers and consumers. Food chains are ecological networks. In the agricultural sector, these bundles of connections all overlap.



Per the interview above, mad cow disease (MCD) became a problem when the life of the cow became a closed circuit -- farmers, to boost protein in the diet of cows (because the bovine growth hormone being injected into the cows worked best w/ a high protein diet -- chains of causality) fed chopped up, rendered cow parts to the herd, turning them into unwitting cannibals. Dead cows were fed to living cows, so the relatively rare spongy brain problem was fed back into the system, increasing the likelihood of the problem intensifying. Per Sheldon Rampton: "And that could create a closed amplification loop". AKA a positive feedback loop, like you get when you hold a microphone too close to the speaker it is connected to.



The nature of interactions in a network then can be of a positive feedback nature (not always a bad thing) or of a negative feedback nature (like the thermostat in the home -- if the temperature gets to hot, it triggers an event that causes the temperature to drop). Leaps are associated with positive feedback loops; normal development with negative feedback loops.



MCD is a confluence of technological revolution (the genetically-engineered growth hormone) and capitalism (maximization of profit demands new technology whether safe or not for humans and other living things, and requires the re-organization of production around the new technology to squeeze of the maximum profit).



Another interesting dimension of MCD is the disease itself -- MCD is caused not by a bacteria or virus, but rather by a mutant protein. It's not a living thing as such, and standard sterilization practices (including heat, irradiation and or most chemicals) cannot eradicate it, which enables the disease to survive the rigors of the rendering process by which dead cows are turned into food for live cows. Called "prions" (see "Prion Diseases" for more info), these mutant proteins somehow interact with normal proteins causing the normal ones to turn into prions. (Another kind of interaction, in this case in the network of protein interactions within the brain). The result is the disintegration of the brain; holes developing in the middle of it, hence "spongiform".

theyrule.net is a practical and useful application of network science to connections within the ruling class.

On the nature of connections, and the process of one network being replaced by another:



"The world's major financial institutions have all joined this race to develop black-box financial systems. The bulge of credit that moves around the globe with the sun and the time value of money, whose bits and bytes are flowing with ever-increasing velocity, dictate that success goes to the swift. Moving with equal rapidity are the risks that can wipe out unsuspecting players. 'No one really knows how to eliminate all the risks,' says Andrew Lo, who directs the financial-engineering programs at MIT. 'But we do know that less sophisticated technology will lose out over time to more sophisticated technology. That is why the old-boy network is being replaced by the computer network. Call it revenge of the nerds, but everyone on Wall Street is scrambling to develop computer-driven programs.' This is why physics and finance are converging into the new science of phynance."



Thomas Bass (1999) The Predictors.

(Originally posted on another list, a few months back - jd)



In order to "defeat Bush", somebody else needs to get elected. That's the

bigger question. Duh.


What can networks/network science tell us about elections? Campaigns are

(ad hoc) networks, with clusters in various "constituencies" like

fundamentalists, trade unionists, Chicago machine, etc.? Those

clusters/constituencies have hubs/super-connectors, which suggests a

strategy for working w/ them? All of this obvious to anyone who's done

campaign work.


What's more interesting to me is how the clusters are going through a

process of disintegration and reconstruction, driven by the economic

revolution and the ensuing social consequences. The links w/in the clusters

are being destroyed as workers are laid off, city and state budgets

slashed, social anxiety rising, etc etc.


The reconstruction part is more interesting -- e.g., new links/shapes w/in

the trade union movement; peace movement; environment movement. And what

role ideas and vision have to play there; what might come out of the 2004

election process?