Networks Archives
Cities, it turns out, tend to grow in the same sort of ways.
Mathematician Steve Strogatz (who was a mentor of Duncan Watts) has an excellent guest column column up at the Olivia Judson blog about the math of cities. In it he outlines some recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries in how cities scale and develop fairly consistently. As Strogatz waxes at the end:
These numerical coincidences seem to be telling us something profound. It appears that Aristotle's metaphor of a city as a living thing is more than merely poetic. There may be deep laws of collective organization at work here, the same laws for aggregates of people and cells.
It was also interesting to compare the following quote with something Paul Krugman wrote about Hong Kong last week. First Strogatz, "Keep in mind that this pattern emerged on its own. No city planner imposed it, and no citizens conspired to make it happen. Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we're still in the dark about what that something might be." Now Krugman:
Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future -- the way I learned it from science-fiction movies -- was supposed to be Manhattan squared: vertical, modernistic, art decoish.
What the future mainly ended up looking like instead was Atlanta -- sprawl, sprawl, and even more sprawl, a landscape of boxy malls and McMansions. Bo-ring.
The future is never as "pretty" as we would imagine it and when we try to impose that false image what we're often left with is something that may look fine for a year, or even five, but won't age much past that. Kind of interesting to think that part of the reason is that there is something organic and natural happening as cities sprout and when we impose false barriers we're somehow standing in the way. With that said, there are laws in ever major city in the world, so who's to say what's "natural" and what's not?
No real conclusion here, just some interesting stuff to think about (and a realization that I need to read some more from Strogatz). Oh, and the Hong Kong thing was especially interesting because I'm supposed to be going there in a few weeks, so if you have any tips on things to do/people to see while I'm there, please leave a comment or drop a line.
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Just a bunch of stuff that's been floating around in my head lately about the role of networks in our lives.
One idea I've been turning over in my head lately is around the idea of desire lines. These are the unpaved paths people chose to take and eventually trample, turning what was one person's decision to stray from the pavement into an all-but-official route. I love desire lines as a metaphor because they expose the network of collective decision-making that tends to otherwise go unnoticed in the physical world.
On the internet, of course, things are very different. Every day we encounter the fruits of collective decision-making and most of the time are quite aware of the role we play in it. As I wrote in 2006, "I think the most important effect of the internet thus far is that it's exposed the network. For the first time everyone can understand what a network is and how it works. Now that we do, we're beginning to take that knowledge and exploit it." (By the way, I have trouble how much I love the fact that I can pull up forgotten thoughts from 2006 in an instant. It's an amazing power to possess.) This knowledge, of course, is what leads to people gaming the system, whether it be shady search engine optimization or manipulating Digg. Ethical issues notwithstanding, though, it's pretty amazing to think that so many people understand the core functionality of networks (even if they don't understand that they understand).
What's at the heart of this all is data: Before the web there was no real way to fully comprehend how networks functioned because the datasets were so small. In fact, I'd argue, that was true for most things. The web affords us the opportunity to play the role of amateur social scientist, looking at datasets that social scientists would have only dreamed of 30 years ago. As James Fowler explains in this Seed Salon with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi:
Well, the great thing about these massive, passive data sets is that we're going to have really deep information about a very, very large number of people. So we won't be forced anymore to make trade-offs between depth and breadth. But then the question becomes: What kind of preparation are we going to give our students? We've had a revolution in game theory in the past 30 years, so that a good number of political scientists all across the country work only on mathematical, closedform models. We've also had a revolution in the application of statistics.
But both of these revolutions have been built on this atomistic view of human beings. Statisticians make the assumption that all the observations are independent in order to be able to calculate statistical significance. Game theorists make it because, as you know, getting anything to work out in a closed-form model is nearly impossible if you assume that people are taking into account the preferences of other people.
We need not only to ramp up the amount of methodological training that people in social sciences have, but also to shift their perception into realizing that the relationships between people are important.
This is not constrained to social science, or even just academia, as people we all need to ramp up our understanding of the interconnection between individuals and their decisions. In fact, I think laymen may be ahead of the scientists in this respect. Social scientists (especially economists) have a lot invested in the individual view of human beings, the idea that we are rational actors generally unaffected by the world around us. This, of course, is wrong and behavioral economists are doing a great job of throwing a few wrenches into the field (of course the world economy collapsing isn't helping either).
Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling and have lost focus a bit. Partly that's because I don't really know where to go here. I know this is important, but there's a bit of a "what next" feeling left with me. What does a world look like where people understand the fundamentals of network science? How does the observation of group behavior in real time move us in directions we might not have expected? What does it mean for an individual to recognize their role within the mass?
Obviously, I'm not entirely sure how to answer those questions at the moment, but I'll keep thinking about it (and would love any thoughts you have).
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It doesn't make sense to pretend we live in a world of absolutes any more.
This whole entry is about an insanely simple idea: Everything is relative.
That's it.
Success is not an absolute number, rather it's an equation based on the value you extract from an investment. Value, of course, doesn't have a hard definition either. These ideas are not particularly easy for people to deal with.
Take this blog, for instance, I have made $0 in direct revenue: I don't sell ads or anything else here. However, the value I've received as far as friendships, networking, jobs and projects more than make up for the time I've invested here. I've found that's not particularly easy for people to understand that value can be something other than money (but I digress).
I first started thinking about this in relation to power laws (those things that look like hockey sticks laid on their side). One of the core characteristics of a power curve is it's scale-free distribution. Essentially what this means is that no matter how much you zoom in on any part of the curve, you're just going to see another identical curve. (This made me think about "turtles all the way down" but I digress again.)
Anyway, because of the scale-free nature we start to understand that success is relative. If you're looking at blogs, for instance, there's a power curve across the category and then each sub-category (say marketing) is also going to be a power curve, meaning that very few will dwarf the rest in terms of traffic or incoming links. So what's the point of all this? Easy: It's all relative. Indie records, for instance, aren't successful when compared to big label affairs if you're measuring purely on units sold. However, if the measurement is return on investment I don't think it would be all the surprising to see indies win out (especially if you consider the fact that people don't actually need tens of millions of dollars).
This isn't a new idea, people have always understood ROI, however, I think we got distracted by things like platinum records. All of a sudden as a people we started to believe that success was some absolute number ($1 million is a popular one). When cost of production started to lower, however, success began to mean very different things. If I can make a video with my $200 camera and 5 hours of time that 1,000 people watch I may declare it a wild success. Major media outlets could never do that because they have a machine to run and the only way they've figured out to monetize it is with advertising sold per impression (CPM).
But what is a site with few visitors to do? Is it less valuable? The answer is no: It's actually more valuable to advertisers, but less valuable to the publisher (from a purely monetary standpoint). Being able to efficiently target an audience is worth a lot of money, however, if a site or other niche property doesn't have big numbers it may not be able to survive the CPM game. Instead of thinking about other ways to add value, however, most just end up folding. That's sad. While I don't have a definite answer for how to fix it (Google figured out one way, job boards are another interesting one), it's clear that Scott Karp is right when he says page views and CPMs are suppressing online advertising.
That's because everything is relative.
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Bottom line: To understand the world you need to understand networks.
If you happen to have checked out my presentation from University of Montana you will have read lots about my thoughts on the importance of understanding networks.
And since we're on the topic I thought I'd point everyone to a few more network discussions of recent note.
The first comes in the most recent Forbes Magazine issue which just happens to be all about Networks. It's actually a pretty spectacular issue (as evidenced by Chris Anderson's envy). Anyway, the issue includes essays by some amazing folks including Metcalfe (of Metcalfe's law fame), Murdoch, Hurley (YouTube) and DeWolfe (Myspace) -- to name a few. I actually suggest buying the issue as its quite nice to have the whole thing packaged together (something you probably don't hear that often on this site).
Anyway, the point of the issue is that networks are impossible to ignore. As more and more devices are connected, more and more networks will pop up. As more and more networks pop up, more and more power laws will emerge.
John Hagel explains in his must-read "The Power of Power Laws":
Gaussian distributions tend to prevail when events are completely independent of each other. As soon as you introduce the assumption of interdependence across events, Paretian distributions tend to surface because positive feedback loops tend to amplify small initial events. For example, the fact that a website has a lot of links increases the likelihood that others will also link to this website.
McKelvey and Andriani suggest that Gaussian distributions can morph into Paretian distributions under two conditions – when tension increases and when the cost of connections decreases. In our globalizing economy, tension rises as competitive intensity increases and as business landscapes evolve faster than the capacity of most organizations to adapt. At the same time, costs of connections are rapidly decreasing as public policy shifts towards freer movement of goods, money and ideas and rapid improvements in the price-performance of IT infrastructures dramatically reduce the cost of information transmission. Bottom line: Paretian distributions become even more prevalent.
Power laws are a fundamental departure from how we have come to understand the world. The fact that they will only show up more often means no matter what we do, we need to understand how they work and what causes them.
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All about my trip to go speak at the University of Montana
On Friday/Saturday I got the chance to do something I hadn't done in a while: Teach. Most of you don't know, but I spent four years working as a marching band instructor. Every weekend I would teach a group of 60 how to make their way around a football field. It's something I enjoyed immensely and learned a great deal from.
Fast forward to this weekend and thanks to Scott, Mike and all the other at University of Montana's entertainment management program I found myself standing in front of a room of engaged and excited students discussing the intersection of media, marketing, culture and technology. I was joined by Mike McGinley and Wendy Davis, two of the sharpest people I've met on the subject. It was all quite amazing.
Just to give some context, as part of the program they bring out all sorts of professionals to talk about their area of concentration. The class is really quite amazing and unlike anything I experienced in college. Students are hand-picked and give up spring weekends to be part of the program. Obviously this raises the caliber of student, but I don't think I was prepared for just how much. They were engaged, interested and insightful despite the incredible amoutn of time (Friday 5pm-8pm and Saturday 9am-5pm) and pontificating (mostly by me).
Anyway, on Friday night Mike and Wendy kicked off the festivities talking quite a bit about cocreation. Then on Saturday it was my turn.
Let me backtrack for a minute: Two weeks ago I got an email from Mike telling me Max had suggested he drop me a line. Mike asked me to come out to Montana and initially I declined because I didn't feel like I had enough time to prepare for a 90 minute presentation. Luckily Mike convinced me that it was no sweat and I really just need to come out and be prepared to talk about the stuff I write about all the time on my blog.
I agreed.
Of course, however, going completely off the cuff wasn't in the cards (I have a brand to maintain), so the first thing I decided to do was take a bunch of interesting entries and make a slide for each with relevant quotes. I then designed a little checklist that corresponded. The idea was that I would let the class decide what topics we'd cover. My little bit of originality came at the bottom of the sheet which was a tear off section asking for name, email, website and comments.
Again, though, I didn't feel like this was enough so I added an intro to the presentation. First I said who I was and what I do and then I explained the way I approach thinking about this stuff (mostly 'medium is the message').
All in all it went fantastic. I ended up talking for a very long time with lots of interesting back-and-forth. The class asked some great questions and I got some incredibly flattering comments on my little sheets (inspiring came up a few times). Anyhow, it was just fantastic.
To the students that were there: Thank you. Thanks for having me in your class and sitting through all my pontificating. Thanks for listening and asking such great questions. It really made me feel good and I owe it all to you guys.
Oh, and in the next few days I will write an entry with all the links we discussed.
I've set up a separate page to download the presentation. I'm actually going to ask people to leave their email address (just because I'm curious who wants it). If this is a serious issue or you think it's a dumb idea let me know by email or in the comments.
You can download the presentation at http://www.noahbrier.com/presentations/uofm. Hope you enjoy!
Update (4/23/07): If you tried to download the presentation and it didn't work, try again. I think I fixed everything.
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Hi, I'm 