The Network Unbound

As many know, the “old” web was once a novelty because of its ability to transfer information that allowed users to change and enhance their interaction with their own computers. As our technological industry continues to pick up speed, we are now entering the proclaimed “Web 2.0″ era, one where the internet will serve as a much more vast tool by directly linking people together in various ways to enhance their own interactions. While many realize internet sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Wikipedia have infiltrated the lives of people across the globe, the underlying importance of their power may go unnoticed. Besides the obvious social mapping and mass-information processing these sites are capable of, they are also a more visual, and much more accessable, form for viewing and influencing the actual dynamics that circulate in the lower, less visible, levels of any network.

In Boyd’s analysis, networks such as MySpace and Flickr are amplifying and speeding up what the hippest kids on the street always did: incubate trends, nurture subcultures, and remix styles…Rather than exhaust yourself producing what you think the kids might want, you sit back and let them show off for one another.

In other words, investors are not purchasing these networking sites and tools solely for their hit counts and advertising revenue. While they currently are some of the highest visited sites, the revenue calculated to be generated from ad space is trumped by the potential to sell/use the information the sites record. With an established user database, researchers and companies have a large, broad representation of many different human groups and classes. Not only can they effortlessly gather data about any cross-section which they desire, they can also implement a product or idea of their own into the network and hope it catches on with the right online “Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen,” just like how a trend is proposed to propogate in The Tipping Point.

“User-generated content on the Internet will dramatically increase…. We don’t think this is a coolness issue. We believe people want to live their lives online.”

Relating back to class and lecture, Web 2.0’s implementation will allow all facets and dynamics of different networks to be updated and represented almost immediately via the capabilities of the internet and modern computers. Because information sharing is a one way street on internet networks, traversing networks will never have been easier. Instead of a node only being able to ask one other node for information, and then waiting for a reply back to them, nodes will now be able to search for information from multiple nodes at once, and get instantaneous responses. Such quickness and efficiency will allow nodes that are separated by many middlemen and “between” nodes in a network transfer information with much more ease and reliabilty, and the more visual, online representation of the network will accel the process of forming a direct edge between the once very distant set of nodes. The rapidity with which information can be accessed and shared could severly alter the dynamics of a network in a few days, whereas the natural series of events would have taken a few months to change the network.