Networks A Logic of Elsewhere CHID 370/COM 302 Winter 2007.

NetworksA Logic of Elsewhere

CHID 370/COM 302

Winter 2007

Where we’ve been

Development of Computing during the Cold War YearsMilitary Industrial

Complex-Developments in HardwareDevelopments in

UserinterfaceDevelopments in

Networking

Cybernetics and counterculture

• Investigated some of the conceptual advances from Military/Industrial Complex

• Saw how they permeated and informed the counterculture during the 1960s and 1970s– Whole Earth Catalogue

• If the counterculture must use the tools of the MI complex is there an outside to “the system”?

Hyperreal

• If there is no outside, how can we tell what is real?

• Hyperreal as a stae where “values” can’t be determined

• Too much information

• Extension of the computer into our personal lives

This ain’t your father’s reality

• How a state of “real virtuality” permeates current life– Network-The genesis of new social

“structures”– Identity-The possibility/challenge for

new personas– Lives-New ideas about life and creation– Affect-What does it mean “to feel”

Virtually real

• Real virtuality significantly different than previous ways of thinking about reality.

• We can’t describe it by removing ourselves from it (Descartes)

• We must describe it imminently (from the inside)

• The rest of the class to build these tools

Manuel Castells

• Geographer and Social Theorist

• Informational City (1989)– Puts forward the theory of

the super city

• The Information Age: Economy, Society, Culture (1996-1998, rev. 2000)– Map out the dynamics of the

Information Age

Points to build on

• Space of Flows– Information develops because of the

need to regulate flows

• Timeless Time– Specific sense of timelessness and

spacelessness associated with this space

Implications

• Development and Networks– Need an industrial infrastructure

• Information dependent upon industry (but wants to hide it (outsourcing)

– Apparent exception cell phones

– Concentration of resources within urban areas

– Urban areas looking more and more “alike”• Local culture often there for packaging

Non-scalar networks

• Developed by social theorists and graph theorists

• An emergent complex network containing many highly connected hubs

• Not a uniformly distributed network

How do scale free networks emerge?

• Nodes are added one at a time

• Probability of attachment proportional to attachee’s number of connections– Popular attachments

get more popular

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get more popular





Scale free networks

• Human social networks– Six degrees– Sexually

transmitted diseases

– Nomads and genetics

• Protein interactions• WWW• Airlines

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Networks A Logic of Elsewhere CHID 370/COM 302 Winter 2007.

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