Linked Book Review Part 1

Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi covers the links that connect us and how information is often moved from one person to another. Several examples are used throughout Linked to illustrate how information is moved from one person to another. One of the examples, ‘The Party’ creates the following scenario, “at a party with ten guests, none of whom initially knows one another, social ties form as the guests start chatting in small groups. At first, the groups are isolated from each other. Indeed, though there are social links between those in the same group, everyone outside of that group is still a stranger. As time goes on, three guests move to different groups and a giant cluster emerges. Although not everyone knows everyone else, there is now a single social network that includes all the guests. By following the social links, one can now find a path between any two guests.” These links are also illustrated through the use of the internet. For example, Facebook is quite like this example in the sense that each person is connected to their group of friends, however, adding a photo with a friend brings about a connection now between your friends and friends of your friend who is also featured in the picture. Now, there is a connection between the two groups because your friends will comment on the photo and their friends will comment on the photo and in turn comment on each other’s comments.

Another example used is the six degrees of separation principle. This principle used “to demonstrate that people on Earth today are much closer than ever.” This especially proven with the emergence of social media, and social networking sites that bring people closer together. The six degrees of separation discovered in 1929 and then rediscovered in 1967 long before the birth of MySpace and Facebook was the belief that. “We could name any person among earth’s one and a half billion inhabitants and through at most five acquaintances, one of which he knew personally he could link to the chosen one.” The mind blowing part about this theory is that this is something that was discovered long before the internet came along, and in a sense made the degrees of separation even smaller. It is easy to find that by one friend you are can be connected to the President. With the expansion of the internet the question posed, “how many acquaintances would it take to connect two randomly selected individuals?” can be put to the test with a few clicks through your Facebook “mutual friends” list. How often has it been found that there are friends you share with your friends that you had no idea they were connected. This illustrated through a Mark Granovetter’s Social World example stating that, “our close friends are often friends with each other as well. The network behind such a clustered society consists of small, fully connected circles of friends connected by strong ties. Weak ties connect the members of these friendship circles to their acquaintance, who have strong ties to their own friends. Weak ties play an important role in any number of social activities, from spreading rumors to getting a job.”