Superconnected Few - Week 7 blogpost

"If someone has five thousand "friends," after all, they clearly cannot all be close friends. No one has the time and social energy to maintain such strong bonds with a great many people." (Buchanan, 2013. p.149)

A known facebook phenomenon is the social need to add more and more "friends" to an already inflated list. Happily, not all of us fall prey to this urge, but those that do, and even those that don't but who still acquire a substantial list of acquaintances made across a surrealistically vast spectrum of time and space, could be described as "connectors," to take a term used in Buchanan's essay about ecological networks, and apply it to social networks, as Buchanan also does. These "connectors," then, are described as having a great number of "weak links" to other organisms - in this case, people.

Buchanan argues that it is primarily these multitudinous weak links which make the "superconnected few" (p.149) "keystones" to the stability of the networks they belong to. According to this theory, Facebook is fundamentally designed to be an example of one of the most stable networks imaginable, with each member allocated an unlimited number of potential connections within the network. This capacity combined with the general trend of "collecting" friends as a kind of status symbol, ensures that the Facebook ecosystem positively thrives.

Network maps - this is a representation of the entire internet, but many other networks when mapped in a similar way would resemble this.

The exponential growth of Facebook as a network may be testament to the "flexible, mobile and self-policing" (Wilkinson, 2013) nature of post-fordism, one name for the dominant economic system existing in most industrialized countries since the late twentieth century (Wikipedia, 2013). It may also be testament to the fact that even those man-made networks which may appear to be destructive to, or at least out of harmony with, Nature, are actually created according to universal, natural patterns (Buchanan, 2013).

References

Buchanan, M. (2002). Nexus: Small worlds and the groundbreaking science of networks. New York, NY: W.W. Norton Company.

Wilkinson, R. (2013) BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives, and the making of place, week 7 notes. [lecture notes]. James Cook University. Cairns, Australia.

Image Reference
Johnson, T. (n.d.) Quantum network theory. Retrieved from  http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/quantum-network-theory-part-1/