Today I again turn on the computer and wait to connect to Internet server through the LAN to read many messages which are waiting for. Currently ‘Google’ is searching 3,307,998,701 pages in the web, and the total number of pages would be up to one billion. We are assuming that there are 16 million people in our world. And many people have several domain names and under each domain name, there are several pages linked to the index page. Before taking this class I couldn’t’ understand how the Internet could be connected to every machine in the world. When I experienced email and Internet for the first time, I was very surprised about that. I still don’t know technically how fax machines and telephones connect to each other, but after reading this book which is titled <Nexus-small world and the groundbreaking science of social network>, I now understand well about the web connection and much more clearly than before. From the point of reading Milgram’s theory about ‘six degrees of separation’ in the ‘prelude’ of this book, and to the end, I really enjoyed this book.

The author, Mark Buchanan, starts this book from the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’. This states if we draw many dots on a paper representing many persons and connect two dots together, like a link between the people, we can see that one dot can reach to any other within six lines. And Buchanan describes how this surprising theory can be proved, showing many cases as examples. To connect 60 million people in the world, each person needs to know only 25 persons theoretically. And if we are going to tie all of Internet pages in the world, the Internet explorer needs to pass through less than 10 transmission lines. The two examples above sound amazingly simple. But the second one seems to be already applicable in real Internet connection.
Another interesting point of Buchanan’s contents is the importance of weak ties. In the real world of the networks, strong ties are not so important. Because even though one connection of strong-ties, like kind of family relationships and friendships, are weaker or broken, it never seriously affects other social connections. When we are thinking about our social network, the connection between the two points doesn’t need to be strong. For example, a sociologist, Granovetter, investigates how many people find their jobs. They find their job through weak links of social network not through friends or immediate family bonds. Contrary to my expectation, 84% people answered that they finally got a job through weak connection of “occasional” and “rare” intimacy. In the real world, the human social Network seems to be made with many weak links.

In addition, Buchanan found an alarming economic message in the real world from a web search engine example. He points out that the principle of economy, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, is also applied to search engines. When we think about the ‘Google’ or ‘Yahoo’ search engine, we can notice that the order of pages coming up on the screen page, after searching, depends on the popularity of the page. If people visit a page more often, then that page will be shown first. And because it appears first among the pages, more people visit it more often, and it makes the page more popular. The author mentions that if we are looking at this more deeply, then we can see how the real world principle of “the rich get richer “ applies in this real example and we can also discover where the social economic power comes from and how this power can gained and shifts to another. Buchanan also points out that being guided to a popular page also limits us simultaneously. Because less popular sites are hidden from us, and popularity is not a indication of quality. It’s a big drawback of the Internet network system. We need to think about diverse way of searching system of portal sites.

The author tries to explain many possible areas in relation to the network system, and emphasizes that finding a pattern would solve many unknown problems in this real world, such as HIV. He shows how the model of social network can explain the progress of an epidemic, because an epidemic spreads from person to person, between the people. So isolation would be the best way to stop spread of the epidemic, if it is now spreading from one region, A few months ago we saw SARS begin from China, Hong Kong and so countries prohibited travel to those places. But like AIDS, this disease spreads all around of the world, and it is difficult to find out a solution to stop it. So we should find a pattern of the spread and apply it at the very important points. “Taking the insight from complex network theory and putting into practice, ” (p183)

Overall this book wants to explain that how the social network is constructed theoretically, with many patterns that the scientists and mathematicians have discovered and how we can apply this model or concept to each field to make our life better. The author also mentions that it is not easy for this simple theory to be adapted in practical contexts, because it looks too simple to be applied. I also doubt that the theory can be applied to real solutions, but I would like to be one of the people who see that these network theories will solve many problems.

10/21/03

Hyun Jean Lee