Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Connected
October 19, 2010
Redundancy really isn’t an ethical practice, but I really wanted to jot this down for future reference. It’s an excerpt from Connected by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, via this place:
“The networks we create have lives of their own. They grow, change, reproduce, survive, and die. Things flow and move within them. A social network is a kind of human superorganism, with an anatomy and a physiology-a structure and a function-of its own. From bucket brigades to blogospheres, the human superorganism does what no person could do alone. Our local contributions to the human social network have global consequences that touch the lives of thousands every day and help us to achieve much more than the building of towers or the destruction of walls.
A colony of ants is the prototypic superorganism, with properties not apparent in the ants themselves, properties that arise from the interactions and cooperation of the ants. By joining together, ants create something that transcends the individual: complex anthills spring up like miniature towers of Babylon, tempting wanton children to action. The single ant that finds its way to a sugar bowl far from its nest is like an astronaut stepping foot on the moon: both achievements are made possible by the coordinated efforts and communication of many individuals. Yet, in a way, these solitary individuals-ant and astronaut, both parts of a superorganism-are no different from the tentacle of an octopus sent out to probe a hidden crevice.
In fact, cells within multicellular organisms can be understood in much the same way. Working together, cells generate a higher form of life that is entirely different from the internal workings of a single cell. For example, our digestion is not a function of anyone cell or even one type of cells. Likewise, our thoughts are not located in a given neuron; they arise from the pattern of connections between neurons. Whether cells, ants, or humans, new properties of a group can emerge from the interactions of individuals. And cooperative interactions are hallmarks of most major evolutionary leaps that have occurred since the origin of life-consider the incorporation of mitochondria into eukaryotic cells, the agglomeration of single-cellorganisms into multicellular organisms, and the assembly of individuals into superorganisms.
Social networks can manifest a kind of intelligence that augments or complements individual intelligence, the way an ant colony is “intelligent” even if individual ants are not, or the way flocks of birds determine where to fly by combining the desires of each bird. Social networks can capture and contain information that is transmitted across people and time (like norms of trust, traditions of reciprocity, oral histories, or online wikis) and can perform computations that aggregate millions of decisions (such as setting a market price for a product or choosing the best candidate in an election). And networks can have this effect regardless of the intelligence of the individual members. Consider, for example, that the way humans laid a rail network throughout England in the twentieth century resembles the way fungi (another species that forms superorganisms) collaboratively explore a patch of ground in the forest in order to exploit and transport resources by creating a network of tubes. Fungi can even “collaborate” to find the best path through mazes into which they have been placed by human experimenters.
Social networks also have a memory of their own structure (staying intact even if people come and go) and their own function (preserving a culture even when people come and go). For example, if you join a trusting network of people, you benefit from that trust and are shaped by it. In many cases, it is not just that the people in your network are more trusting, or even that their trusting behavior engenders trust in you; rather, the network facilitates this trust and changes the way individuals behave.
Like living creatures, networks can be self-replicating. They can reproduce themselves across space and time. But unlike corporeal organisms, networks can, if disassembled, reassemble themselves at a distance. If every person has a memory of whom he or she is connected to, we can cut the connections and move all the people from one place to another, and the network will reappear. Knowledge of one’s own social ties means that the network can reemerge even though no single person knows how’ everyone else in the network is connected.
Networks are also self-replicating in the sense that they outlast their members: the network can endure even if the people within it change, just as cells replace themselves in our skin, computers are swapped out on a server farm, and new buyers and sellers come to a market that has been located in the same place for centuries. In one study of a network of four million people connected by their phone calls, researchers showed that, paradoxically, groups with more than fifteen interconnected people that experienced the greatest turnover endured the longest. Large social networks may in fact require such turnover to survive, just as cell renewal is required for our bodies to survive.
These observations highlight another amazing, organism-like property: social networks are often self-annealing. They can close up around their gaps, in the same way that the edges of a wound come together. One person might step out of a bucket brigade, but then the two people he was connected to will move closer to. each other, forming a new connection to fill in the gap. As a result, water will continue to flow. In more complicated, real-life networks, it seems likely that the very purpose of redundant networks ties, and of transitivity, is precisely to make the networks tolerant of this kind of loss, as if human social networks were designed to last.
Like a worldwide nervous system, our networks allow us to send and receive messages to nearly every other person on the planet. As we become more hyperconnected, information circulates more efficiently, we interact more easily, and we manage more and different kinds of social connections every day. All of these changes make us, Homo dictyous, even more like a superorganism that acts with a common purpose. The ability of networks to create and sustain our collective goals continues to strengthen. And everything that now spreads from person to person will soon spread farther and faster, prompting new features to emerge as the scale of interactions increases.”