Linked

I really enjoyed the first chapters of Albert-László Barabási’s book Linked: The New Science of Networks, because it made me approach the Internet in a manner I am not accustomed to. As a student with a perpetual fear of numbers and a lover of social studies, I didn’t think of the nodes in terms of math and graphs. This made me begin to think of the map in other ways too, and soon, I was reminded of one of my favorite books of all time, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

A tipping point, according to Gladwell, is the point of critical mass, where change becomes unstoppable. Gladwell explains that the tipping point of social epidemics occur because of the involvement of a small percent of the participants of activities with particular skills. He proceeds to describe these three different types of people. First you need connectors, people with large social networks who have a knack for making friends and acquaintances (a great excerpt from the book to discover whether you are a connector can be found here: http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/tp_excerpt2.html). Second, you need mavens, who are the “information specialists,” that others rely upon to discover new facts. Third, you need salesmen who are the charismatic persuaders.

After recalling the book, I began to apply the concepts to viral videos, the closest equivalent I could think of as an internet social epidemic, and it made sense. In my mind, I began to picture the nodes as different websites that served the three special purposes to make the video go viral. First, I imagined blogs as the website maven, picking up on the video when no one else but Internet specialists could find it. Then, I imagined a large media website like CNN.com picking up on the story from the blog, and acting as the persuader, legitimizing the video that the bloggers found. Finally, I see a social network like myspace.com or facebook.com acting as the connector spreading the video out to millions of people. During this exercise, a picture of interconnecting nodes began to develop in my head.

I am sure there are many different ways Gladwell’s book could be used and combined with web 2.0, and even those who are reading this post probably could interpret it differently. However, the point of this post is that Barabási’s book made me begin to realize how many different studies and theories exist which could be combined to provide a clearer picture of social networks.