Endless Knots

A blast into network space with Christakis

This starts with a Facebook post that's been making the rounds, the one about Stephen Wolfram's new work with a catchy headline that may or may not describe what Wolfram is talking about: "Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolfram’s utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm."

I've read the article three times, discussed it with a computer scientist, and am still not clear on exactly what Wolfram is proposing, though we all run into the problem he's trying to solve (not specifically, i.e. I don't really need to know where the International Space Station is right now but...):

Wolfram wants to make the world computable, so that our computers can answer questions like “where is the International Space Station right now.” That requires a level of machine intelligence that knows what the ISS is, that it’s in space, that it is orbiting the Earth, what its speed is, and where in its orbit it is right now.

I do want to find real answers to my search questions and if Wolfram's on the path, let's go. 

Last night, I noticed  a rather long stream of thoughtful comments about the Wolfram piece, replying to my friend Doug Lea's Facebook query, "To ask David Letterman's question, "Is this something, or is it nothing?". People weighed in with serious commentary, one seemingly knowledgeable person after another, speculating/rendering opinions about whether what Wolfram is proposing makes sense. (My local computer scientist, by the way, tells me it does.)

In addition to the actual comments, what stood out to me was that thoughtful conversation was actually transpiring, a refreshing break from the bitter political acrimony that has caused friends to actually quit Facebook from time to time and the well-meaning attaboy/girls that I, for one, am guilty of participating in constantly on Facebook (Yay, you! How beautiful/sweet/cute!). One daughter of mine calls it Bragbook for good reason.

So I posted a comment to that effect on Doug's page, remarking that the discussion reminded me of the early days on EIES, back when there were only a few hundred thousand/million people online around the world anyway and when we still had no idea that we could order leggings after our discussions on whether computers would someday be in everyone's "electronic cottages."

And, I said something about Wolfram's new work, noting that he never used the word "network" in the article, which I mentioned to the local computer scientist who explained that while he may not have used the word explicitly, he believed that if asked Wolfram would agree that there were network properties inherent in his work.

This caused Doug to ask me to take a look at this talk by Dr. Nicholas Christakis at a recent Edge conference. OK. Once again, I'm out of it. Apparently, Edge has been going on for 15 years, thanks to John Brockman, whose name I know from the olden days of publishing, i.e. Brockman's agency put a lot of popular scientists/good writers on the map, and he himself has written some interesting books. Christakis's topic at HeadCon 13, "The Science of Social Connections," is definitely worth the 30 minutes (not 3, 30) if you're at all interested in networks.

I am. I've been working on networks since 1979, writing about them, developing ideas for nearly all that time with Jeff Stamps, who first alerted me to Christakis's work. Shortly thereafter, Jeff and I were invited to speak at the International Conference on Complex Systems, where Christakis also was speaking and which I touched on in this post.

In Christakis's Edge talk (the videography is gorgeous), he sweeps the field, dropping ah-has by the minute, including his near-opener, that links--the connections among us--are as important, no, he says more important, than the nodes--the people. Zinger. I wish the whole talk had been about this but then again everything in it is so interesting that I'll give a pass. He notes that the network structures of pre-agricultural-age people (there's still a little tribe of them numbering 1000 who sleep under the stars and aren't on Facebook--yet), are identical to ours; that contagion spreads differently depending on network structure; and that other species have similar networks. Lots of stuff. Love it.

Where I see another "edge" is taking all the deep work and popular fascination with social networks and merging it with organizational networks, the structures that we work in, go to school in, vote in, yes, the same ones that make us want to throw shoes at the screen. How are our organizational structures influenced by the findings of social networks and how can we use those findings to create more humane/human organizations? Org charts have looked the same since the days of the railroads and the industrial-era behemoths that were erected to manage them. We've learned so so much. It's time to integrate the worlds. Dr. Christakis?

 

PS to The Edge crowd: The Monty Python-esque guy carrying around the bike wheel who appears from time to time in Christakis's video? Schtick? Send the guy the rest of the bike? 

 

 

Uh-oh: Don't catch divorce

From the department of everything's related to everything and the seemingly endless findings stemming from the Framingham Heart Study, here's yet another research study proving that networks carry a lot of strange viruses. According to the study, you're much more likely to divorce if a friend divorces (75% more likely) and somewhat more likely (33%) if a friend of a friend divorces.

I'm not making this up. See this article by Rick Morin on the Pew Center site.

Here's the graphic from a new study by Brown University's Rose McDermott and stalwart network-contagion researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. Its title tells the story: "Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else Is Doing It Too: Social Network Effects of Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample."

I draw two conclusions from this: one, get rid of all your friends; and two, don't live in Framingham, which is where many of these studies have been done. You might have a heart attack, smoke, gain weight, and, now get divorced.

(No, no...I greatly admire Christakis et al. Terrific insights into the "stremgth of all ties" -- I just made that up.)

Wolfram on Facebook

I spend a lot of time thinking about networks, trying to comprehend what network science is telling us, frankly trying to make sense of the endless network visualizations being generated. Of course, I tried out LinkedIn Inmap and will certainly try Facebook's Graph Search as soon as I'm deemed linked enough to be worthy.

So when I woke up to an email from Wolfram Alpha offering to analyze my Facebook network ("Personal Analytics for Facebook," I clicked and clicked and clicked until I got a very full report. Interesting, very Facebook-y:

• My most commented on photo? My darling twin grandsons? No, no. My dog, Belle, the day she died.
• Are most of my friends men or women? 58%:41%
• Oldest friend is my cousin, Julius Blank (98); youngest is my namesake cousin, Jessica Lipnack (22)
• Distribution of my friends' ages follows ye olde belle curve, with most exactly my age (ah, George School classmates)
• My friend with the most mutual friends is Rusty Barnes (go, Rusty!), whom I know through writing and have met only once
• The top 10 friends with the most friends are not people I really know at all (I have a liberal acceptance policy which my children have excoriated me for)
• After the US, Canada, and the UK, I have the most friends in the Netherlands (I've been there many times for work)
• My top commenter is a boyfriend from my youth :)

Having been unsuccessful posting a clip of one of the graphs, I leave it to you to generate your own maps. Meanwhile, I'll think about what this means. Something about all kinds of proximity trumping everything else -- most friends are relatively close to me physically, most are my age, many are writers... I better diversify -- quick!

More seriously, having this kind of analytical output from the graphs (meaning network maps in plain English) is what makes them useful. I could have looked at endless webs of the same material and not easily grasped things like the fact that I mostly post on Tues at 9 AM. Is that useful info? If I were a deeper analyst, it probably is. If I were marketing, then comparing that with response would be truly useful. Now I go off to ponder, at 8:15 on a Thursday, why Tuesdays?

Egyptian revolution on Twitter

Thanks to Susan Scrupski:

Andre Pannison, a network scientist at the University of Turin, hauled out some network tools (and some clever thinking) to map one hour of Twitter activity at the time of Mubarak's resignation on Feb 11. It's worth reading Andre's post describing what he did. And it's really required viewing for those interested in how networks evolve. Such beautiful patterns emerge from the simple act of messaging.

 

 

And here are a few paragraphs of his explanation:

This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak’s resignation. If you retweeted someone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that your username is one of these tinny points (or maybe a bigger one?).

To collect the network data, I used the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin, connected it to a Python web server I made myself. This web server works like a bridge, it connects to the Twitter Streaming API using the statuses/filter service and converts the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a network format that can be read by the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin. Nodes are twitter users, and links appear between the nodes A and B when B retweeted a message of A containing the hashtag #jan25.

Take that, Gladwell: Vinegar, onions, social networks, and soccer nuts a revolution do make

For anyone who still doubts (Malcolm Gladwell) the role of informal communication, aka social media, in bringing about monumental change before the whole world's very eyes in Egypt, see today's lead story (headlined in print version) of NY Times, "A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History."

Excellent, detailed, and insightful reporting lays out the sequence by which, the online subhead reads*: "Two-year collaboration of dissidents gave birth to a new force — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it."

I've been pondering this post for nearly two hours, trying to figure out a way to summarize the low-tech/high-tech amalgam that so fundamentally reshapes the chemistry of the future. I can't do better than to quote the first few paragraphs, though the whole thing is definitely click-worthy. In fact, I just read a bundle of grafs from one of the jump pages (there are two) to a traveling family member. It's remarkable, friends, right down to the people in Cairo (perhaps elsewhere) protecting themselves with "body armor," if you can call it that, made of "cardboard or plastic bottles...worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets."

Here's the beginning of David Kirpatrick and David Sanger's remarkable journalism:

"CAIRO — As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: 'Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.'

"The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley."

These are big claims for a lede article in the paper of record. The reporters go on to substantiate the assertions in the next section, headlined "Bloggers Lead the Way:"

"The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.

"By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

"After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups...

"Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. 'We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,' Mr. Maher recalled."

And on it goes. I could continue excerpting but it's better for you to read it yourself. It is more than evident that those responsible for this miraculous transformation in the geopolitical scene simply used the tools of their time, just as the Committees of Correspondence used a nascent postal service to refine their strategy and tactics among a million or so people in a troublesome land that became the US of A.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: The naysayers around the importance of new media also disparage those who have had the courage to keep at it. Again, it's people who made the difference here. Thank heavens they had such powerful tools with which to communicate.

Last thing: the Times article says the protestors have been strongly influenced by "an American political thinker, Gene Sharp." I've never heard of him. Start following the links from here, which include the Serbian youth movement, Optor!'s, which helped bring down Milosevic.

And when you lose faith again that dictators can be deposed and retreat to thinking that the future looks terribly bleak even in places where there are no dictators, only zealots, turn your attention to the next generation. Perhaps one day "they" could become ideologues too but the best part of this story is that there is no monolithic "they" this time. Just a loosely structured network of energized activists whose architecture of revolution--and tools--are barely understood.

Also, see Nicholas Kristof's "What Egypt Can Teach America" in yesterday's NY Times.

* I never realized before how different the print and online heads are in NYT articles - subtle but different.

Does The New Yorker Need Gladwell?

If reaction to Malcolm Gladwell's latest dump of cold water on the flaming arc between social media and social change is any measure, The New Yorker very much needs this able writer to keep the links flying. He's got the neterati all up in their (our) nodes starting with the headline of his short Februrary 2, 2011, post, "Does Egypt Need Twitter?" Gladwell's two-letter answer: No.

My favorite headline so far comes from Business Insider's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: "Sorry Malcolm Gladwell, But You're Making Zero Sense On Twitter And Egypt."

For comprehensive deconstruction of Gladwell's 370 words, see David Weinberger's "Gladwell proves too much," where he takes down every syllable of Gladwell's argument. Argument, Gladwell's is, as he throws in provocation after poke ("Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?" or "Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.)

Gladwell tries to refute the impact of social media on the Egyptian revolution to prove the central thesis of his New Yorker article from last fall: “'High risk' social activism requires deep roots and strong ties." Its subtitle encapsulates his surrounding hypothesis, "Why the revolution will not be tweeted." (My view/refutation of that article here.)

OK. In 2011, it's hard to resist saying things like "that's just dumb."

But more to the point, as a reporter, Gladwell badly needs a fact-checker. He clearly has not put together any kind of timeline, spoken with anyone in Egypt, or, frankly, observed a primary tenet of journalism: accuracy. Granted his post, which suffers from the blogger-weakness of "off-the-top-of-the-headism," is Gladwell's opinion but he is ignoring the well-documented way things have unfolded, beginning with the Facebook page with its background, We are all Khaled Said.

Even the demonstrators in Tahrir Square have been astonished at what "the youth" have wrought. I'm not going to run this all down--that's a long piece that someone (probably many someones) are working on right now--but a spark was lit and then social media made it very easy for word to spread. And to make plans. And to meetup, as it were.

Second OK: Gladwell's other huge factual error is his view of social activism (as per above, "[it] requires deep roots and strong ties"). True but incomplete. Scores of studies, books, re-studies, and more books have proved that social activism depends both on strong ties AND weak ones.

Mark Granovetter's elegant title to his 1973 groundbreaker, "The Strength of Weak Ties," whom, by the by, Gladwell misinterprets in his original screed, lays the early network science foundation for why social activism depends on both kinds of ties.

The hundreds of thousands, if not millions when you count up all the cities, of people in Egypt don't all have strong ties, Malcolm. Smaller pods of them have very strong links; between/among the pods are weak ties--and the occasional strong ones. The whole thing hangs together--and people keep turning out--because of these loose and strong connections. That's a movement. And it spreads at lightning speed thanks to social media networks, where again the ties are both iron and gossamer.

"PPPSSEOT(3)SIL: Please, please, please stop sending e-mails over three (3) sentences in length"

If it makes you laugh once (yes, lol), it's a pretty funny piece.

Twice, well, you're thanking Martin Marks, for "E-mail Auto-Response" in October 25, 2010, New Yorker. Some lols:

"Thank you for your e-mail, which, if it is under three (3) sentences long, I have read...

"If your e-mail has been cc’d to three (3) or more people, and includes complicated yet unresolved logistical information regarding the location, time, or general coördination of an upcoming social gathering involving five (5) or more people, then please wait until two (2) hours after the last respondent has answered and then please call the number provided at the bottom of the e-mail. (Be prepared to detail the conclusions reached by the e-mail chain.)...

"Should you receive a speedy one-to-two-word response, please do not read anything into it. More often than not, such a response doesn’t even correspond to the content of your e-mail..."

And my very favorite:

"In closing, I would like to say that the Internet has become a veritable buzzing, stinging hornet’s nest of pings and pongs and klings and klangs, so please do not e-mail, text-message, instant-message, direct-message, Facebook-message (if you’re still on MySpace or Friendster, that’s just plain creepy), Facebook-chat, iChat, tweet, retweet (don’t even mention Twitter mentions), StumbleUpon, LinkIn with, zoom into, Google Buzz, Plaxify, Jigsaw, Digg, Skype, Spoke, poke, flick, or tag me..."

Read more

Gladwell's New Yorker piece on networks: letter to editor

There's been a bit of a dust-up among networking aficianados since The New Yorker published Malcolm Gladwell's "Small Change: The revolution will not be tweeted" in its Oct 4 issue. While we all bow to him for bringing some key networking ideas to a mass audience with The Tipping Point, we need to send him back to school before he writes another piece like this. Factual errors, wrong conclusions, and major points missed typify his work this time. Here's just one thoughtful post from my friend David Weinberger; google the article title and the word blog and you'll find a whole lot more.

Having received last week's New Yorker with reader response to the article, I now know that they're not going to publish the letter to the editor that we fired off. (I hit the jackpot on this once before in defense of Bucky Fuller, blogging about it here with a bit of a backstage view of how this process works.) Thus, I'm publishing it here in the hopes that Mr. Gladwell will think about these points before he writes more on this subject as one has to wonder whether he's working on a book about this.

To the editor:

For a one-piece-has-it-all view of every wrong-headed yet sadly popular view of networks, read Malcolm Gladwell's "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted." Gladwell does a great job of conflating social networks with social action with network structure and ignores the past thirty years of research and analysis of networks as organizational structures.

Among his myths, which he puts forward as truth:

#1. That networks are leaderless. Wrong. Networks are leaderful. Many leaders give networks their resiliency, speed, and reach.

#2. That networks stand in opposition to hierarchy. Unh-uh. Thanks to the new science of networks, we're able to apply network theory to rigid hierarchies. Guess what? Hierarchies are networks too, just a special case.

#3. That social networks cannot really engage, motivate, and inspire people. Sadly, he's under-reported here. At the risk of raising political spectres of elections past, what was Obama/2008 but a massive eruption of social networking, intermingled with hierarchy? That's the way it really works. Networks and hierarchies (in the traditional way that Gladwell interprets them) interweave one another, as they also did in the civil rights movement, where "circuit riders" bridged formal organizations, forging ties that those on the outside could barely see.

Finally, #4 for all the business types: That networks don't design new products. Huge error here: Networks comprise companies like Benetton, where hundreds of small decentralized firms network to design and produce apparel marketed under a common banner. And, networks such as these turn around economies, as they have done in Northern Italy and Denmark, where small business networks banded together to reverse terrible declines in employment and GDP.

Networks are the oldest, the most enduring, the most flexible, and, bless them, the newest structues that we have. Dismissing them without truly understanding them leaves a lot of networkers, like ourselves, scratching our heads, maybe even tweeting.

--Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, authors of The Age of the Network and The TeamNet Factor (Wiley, 1996, 1993) and Networking (Doubleday, 1982)
West Newton, MA

Text, don't talk, to your teens?

Apparently, according to Kate Tuttle's "I love you, now do your homework :)" in today's Boston Globe. One snippet:

Dr. Laura Prager, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and mother of two teenagers, texts with her kids. It’s a method she adopted when her older child, a son now in college, went through a phase of not answering her phone calls. “But if I texted him,’’ she says, “he answered me right away.’’

For a teenager who’s out and about, at school or sports practice, texting is infinitely preferable to fielding phone calls from mom, especially in front of peers, Prager points out.

Most anecdotes in the article reference daughters texting with mothers (although this example is from a son). I wonder whether there's a gender difference.

Clay Shirky: "Pay attention to young mothers"

Thanks to Santiago Bunce at Interaction Institute for Social Change for the pointer to Clay Shirky's talk at TED in 2005, which begins thusly:

How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just begin chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs.

One of best explanations I've heard of the "power law" whereby a small number of people are responsible for a great proportion of the output/productivity/input of the "group"...whatever...and a large number of people are responsible for a fraction of same. Let me go out on a limb here and call it the classic 80/20 rule (as Clay, and everyone else, does). Clay illustrates with pictures from Flickr and points to how a single person making one really good contribution is also critical to the "system"--as well as one stellar example of a Linux developer coming up with a single phenomenal security patch, not 3000 patches.

Provocative, lots to think about. Thanks, as always, Clay.

Oh, the title of this post? Clay points out that inventors rarely know how people will use their brilliant ideas. As of the time of his TED talk, Clay points out that stay-at-home moms, not classic Internet affinity groups per se, were the original power users of meetup.com. If you want to know "what technology is going to change the world," he says, "Don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys. Pay attention to young mothers because they don't have an ounce of support for technology that doesn't make their lives better." Touche!