Six Degrees by Duncan Watts
Posted on January 25th, 2004
This is a book about the networks that shape daily life, like social networks, job hierarchies, economics, electricity, the Internet-- all these and many more. It's about the width, height, and depth of networks, the way they work and why they, and by extension the things they control, behave the way they do. Or, to look at it from a more human perspective, this book is about networks as they relate to the individual's role within a larger collective. The science and math that drives the book is thick, but even if you're only skimming along watching things from the surface, there are a lot of ripples heading out in a lot of directions.
The reviews that have been posted at Amazon at this book seem reasonable, particularly where they warn about the mathematical underpinnings being a possible source of intimidation. There are plenty of sections along those lines, and typically when I came across them they went in one eye and out the other. But I'm not here for a crash course in graph theory, bipartite networks, or anything like that. I'm looking for a better idea of how you can make the most of a network. It's the "so what have you done for me lately?" attitude.
When you start to think of social circles as networks, or the corporate structure of your company as a network, or the number of interactions with other people you have from day to day in terms of a network, certain similarities and parallels start to crop up. This past summer I read Albert Barabási's Linked, which is about the same subjects. One of the things I remember from that book was the discussion about hubs within a network, and how vital they are to the network's structure and function. Now, with Watts' book, there's complimentary material about nodes. For one thing, an ordinary node probably doesn't have the same capacity as a hub. For another, the transition from node to hub might only be identifiable after the fact. All sorts of mitigating factors might reverse the situation in an instant. The underlying forces that trigger these changes apply equally to the inner workings of the Internet as they do to a single person's ability or inability to climb the corporate ladder.
Here are three quotes from the book that were each enough to pull me in deeper. Maybe they'll do the same for you:
Regarding contexts (page 115):
The essence of his talk was that people know each other because of the things they do, or more generally the contexts they inhabit. Being a university professor is a context, as is being a naval officer... All the things we do, all the features that define us, and all the activities we pursue that lead us to meet an interact with each other are contexts. So the set of contexts in which each of us participate is an extremely important determinant of the network structure that we subsequently create.
Regarding corporate communication (page 273):
Firms that are bad at facilitating distributed communications are bad at solving problems, and therefore bad at handling uncertainty and change. Out strategy, therefore, was to think about the organizations as networks of information processors, where the role of the network was to handle large volumes of information efficiently and without overloading any individual processors.
Regarding the value of understanding networks (page 304):
If we want to understand the connected age in any more than a superficial manner, we need to recognize that different classes of networked systems require us to explore different sorts of network properties. In some cases, it may be sufficient to know simply that a network contains a short path connecting any pair of individuals, or that some individuals are many times better connected than others. But in other cases, what may matter is whether or not the shortest paths can be found by the individuals themselves... Being highly connected may be of great use in some circumstances and of little consequence in others-- it may even be counterproductive, leading to failures or exacerbating failures that occur naturally.