networks a go go!

have been scratching my withered brains for ways to “frame” my project for possible postgraduate study next year. its due in a few days, and it’s been a really difficult process. see, it has to be “cohesive” and “achievable within the time frame”. and a lot of my activities are pretty disparate and scattered. kinda like different hats i wear when collaborating within different groups. over a few rewrites i’m getting closer, i think, to throwing an umbrella over the things i’m into by thinking about “networks”.

it could work, for (at least?) 2 reasons:
-first, the obvious connection is an extension of the network of uncollectable artists, which i helped start up last year, and which (despite the successful launch of our bubblegum cards) is yet to really take off as a “network” per se, at least not to the utopian extent i would like…
-second, it would give me the chance to immerse myself in some heavier reading about networks of all types, to find out how they work, and why, and what to expect of them. it all ties in with the web course that i’m doing at tafe too, of course…

some very funny network links have popped up from googling about…such as this one by Charles Kadushin called A Short Introduction to Social Networks:

“A and B are friends as indicated by the double arrow. C and D are also friends. E, D and F are a clique. F has a special liking for G but it is not certain that G reciprocates. Now imagine that A is a Jew and B is an Arab and d through G are also Arab. All the letters but G are men. G is a young woman with an important father. Other things being equal, what are the odds that A and B will remain friends?”

(you have to see the accompanying diagram to make sense of it!!)

another article i found which makes me feel more optimistic about my potential project is entitled Applied Network Theory by Jon Udell. He writes:

The research suggests a kind of grand unified theory: networks made out of anything (molecules, nerve cells, electrical grids, transportation systems, web links, human beings) obey the same laws of growth and arrive at similar structures. In every kind of network, a few nodes differentiate. They attract more links, become hubs or routers, and radically shorten the distance between arbitrary endpoints.”

Udell goes on to make connections between social networks, blogs, software development and the film industry…

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