Watts, Barabasi, and Rice

For this Tuesday we had to read a couple of readings. The first one that I read was a passage from Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts. As a class, we have had to read some of Duncan Watts writings, and for the most part I enjoy what he has to say. He finds a way to connect what he wants to say to his audience. Reading through this passage though, I found it to have too many examples. It just seemed like he was trying to take up more space in his book. For me, it helps when authors use examples when something is confusing, but in this passage, I thought that Watts used too many.

There were many parts of this section that I enjoyed or found interesting. Watts talked about the power of exponential growth and the internet (page 165). The first thing that I thought about was chain mails and forwards. I normally hate receiving forwards in my inbox because I think they are a waste of time. But then I thought about the tactics used by forwards to get people to send them to others. Some examples that I have found after reading the forwards are that if you don’t send to at least so many people, you will either have no friends, have no love, lose money or are unpatriotic. I find these reasons pretty ridiculous when you could be talking about how your favorite color determines what kind of person you are. Another thing that I found very interesting was the “mathematics of epidemics” (page 168). He talked about the SIR model and the three primary stages of an epidemic S stands for susceptible, I for infectious, and R for removed. Then Watts wrote, “a spreading disease is continually being forced by the network back into the already infected population” (page 175). When I read this I thought of computer viruses and how they can be very hard to prevent, especially without anti-virus hardware. It seems like that viruses, technological or intrapersonal, always seem to find a way to infect something else and survive. Even though, the passage talked about how many different diseases end up burning out or being cured before they can infect too many things or people.

Another reading that was assigned was Viruses and Fads by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Mostly this passage was about AIDs, innovators and hubs. The thing that I found the most interesting from this reading was the continually talking about hubs and the creation of epidemics. Barabasi wrote, “Once infected, a hub can pass the virus to all the other computers it is linked to” (page 135). I know this is referenced to computers but it can be applied to everything from AIDs to technology. Once a hub, a very well connected individual, has something the easier it will be to give it to other people. Another quote that I found interesting was about curing an epidemic. “The more hubs we treat ……..the higher the chance that the virus will die out” (page 139). The reading talked about how if we can cure the people who are most likely to spread a disease like AIDs the more likely we will be able to significantly decrease the amount of people with AIDs. He did also note though, that this may be “rewarding promiscuity”.

The last reading that we were assigned was Advertising in the book Writing about Cool by Jeff Rice. In this chapter, Jeff Rice talked about how “cool” is used in advertising to lure in people. I think that most successful businesses are successful because they know how to use this phenomenon. Rice also talked about how icons are used as symbols for “cool” instead of just saying that a product is “cool”. The main example that he used is Nike. As I think about it, Nike may be the company that has used icons and the cool factor better than any other company.