Jun 06
I’ve been reading a book called ‘Critical Mass – how one thing leads to another’ by Philip Ball, which is probably the most influential book to inform my thinking on social networking and interaction of all the books I have read in this subject area. Ball takes a scientific approach to his writing, so it’s fair to say that it’s been a challenging read for someone from my unscientific background! Broadly, the focus of his book is ‘an enquiry into the interplay of chance and necessity in the way that human culture, customs, institutions, cooperation and conflict arise’. It’s been a huge shift in my thinking to look at this area of thought in relation to scientific theory, rather than philosophical, sociological or etymological terms. I’d highly recommend this to anyone wishing to understand more fully the nature of why some developments or initiatives succeed, whilst others fail.
I won’t spoil the book, but he covers a huge range of issues and areas – historically setting the scene with a look at Hobbes Leviathan, matter, large numbers, why some things happen all at once, traffic dynamics, marketplace rhythms, company growth, networks, cyberspace, reciprocity and social planning.
It’s full of wonderful quotes, both from himself and the huge number of sources he cites – here’s a couple:
Much of the real world is controlled as much by the ‘tails’ of distributions as by means or averages; by the exceptional, not the mean; by the catastrophe, not the steady drip; by the rich, not the ‘middle class’. We need to free ourselves from ‘average’ thinking.
(Philip Anderson, 1997)
When I’d had my coffee this morning and went upstairs to get dressed for work, I never considered being a nudist for the day. When I got in my car to drive to work, it never crossed my mind to drive on the left.
(Joshua Epstein, 1999)
I’ll not spoil the book for you if you want to read it, but one section lept out of the pages at me – especially relevant bearing in mind the work I am presently doing on the Glow project:
The remarkable thing is that the Internet has grown unplanned into this seemingly most robust of conceivable networks. No one designed it this way. Indeed, if anyone had possessed the authority to dictate the topology of the Internet, the chances are that they’d have chosen a far less robust architecture. The message is clear: sometimes it is best to let technology organise itself.
We seem to spend increasingly large amounts of time agonising how best to structure something, when the most vital things that we may be overlooking are the facts that a) hyperlinks can take us anywhere, and b) well tagged data is easy to find. What will be more important – well structured heirarchies of groups, or well tagged data and a good seach capability? I suspect the latter.
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On Sunday I was introduced by my nephew to GoGo’s. (If you’re reading this and have no idea what a GoGo is, then check out this video)
