The Connected Age

For this week, we had to read “The Connected Age”, Six Degrees by Duncan Watts. This is probably the reading that I have enjoyed the most this semester. I am pretty sure that I understand the message that he was trying to get across and I got a lot of information from the reading. It was pretty interesting reading about electric power and the “blackout” in the western United States in the summer of 1996.

I also enjoyed reading about networks and how individual parts interact with other parts to make up a complex system or network. The text also talked about synchrony. I didn’t really get that much information out of that section other than the runners’ analogy.

It was also really interesting to learn about the six degrees of separation. I had obviously heard about it before but I couldn’t remember if I had ever learned how it had originated. I thought that Milgrams’ experiment testing his small-world method was a pretty ingenious experiment. I would have never have thought about trying to doing anything like that.

I did have one question, though. The term oscillator was used throughout the text and I had a hard time trying to get what Duncan Watts was trying to mean. I think that he used this word to talk about networks and how they are very dependent on all of the parts that make up that network, but if someone else has another interpretation I would like to hear it.

Well, I guess that is all for this blog. I know that it is a little shorter than normal but I don’t really have much to say because I don’t have that many questions.