Last year I attended a dinner at which conversation eventually turned to books by Malcolm Gladwell. Someone was saying how much he had enjoyed The Tipping Point and Blink when another of our dinner companions leaned in, rolled his eyes and said, roughly, “Gladwell just writes other people’s stuff. Read Nudge, Sway and Linked and you’ll see what I mean.”
My first thought was, that would be a great name for a dating service: “Nudge, Sway and Linked Ltd.. . .We’ll Do What Your Mother Couldn’t.” In fact, I didn’t even bother to sneak my iPhone under the table and jot down the titles. They stuck. And so, when I had a few minutes over the holidays, I downloaded Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a professor and Director, Center for Complex Network Research at Notre Dame.
It turns out that “networks” fall smack dab into my “diaper theory”—that is, once your wife tells you she’s going to have a baby, all you see is diaper ads. So, once I started reading Barabasi’s interesting stuff about networks, I began seeing them everywhere.
Even Avatar—which my family (and most of the rest of the world) saw in 3D IMAX-splendor over Christmas—is set on a planet where every tree has “ten-to-the-fourth” root connections, and there are “ten-to-the-twelfth” trees. Now, that’s a network, and in the case of Avatar, it turns out to be sophisticated enough to hold the spirits of the Na’vi’s ancestors. Until, of course, the evil (American-looking) imperialists come to take away all the unobtainium. (Yep, $500M to make the movie, and the best they could come up with was “unobtanium.” But I digress.)
Barabasi believes that “the construction and structure of graphs or networks is the key to understanding the complex world around us.” By way of example, he plants us at a fictitious cocktail party in which there is one particularly fine bottle of wine. Then, we watch the news of the wine spread, first into little social clusters and eventually into a giant node-like cluster—what physicists call a percolation, scientists a phase transition (as in water to ice), sociologists a community, Malcolm Gladwell the tipping point—and you, well, you call it the point when all of your fine wine is discovered and imbibed.
Everything else in the book is really about how these percolations happen and why we’re all either worried about having our fine wine pilfered or, in the case of a thousand web-based business start-ups—how we can get everyone to find and get drunk on our wine.
That last aspect is of special interest: the organic growth of a “natural” network would suggest that all nodes reach out to all other nodes and live in a kind of perfect balance—hence, all the predictions circa the year 2000 that the Web would democratize the world. We know now, of course, like Animal Farm, that all nodes are created equal, but some are created much, much more equal than others. Google, for example, is the most equal of all. And being a big, powerful node has little or nothing to do with time on this planet—old ones can be small, and new ones, under the right conditions, can percolate into a phase-changing-tipping-point-big-honkin’-community like magic.
That means we can be just as undemocratic, manipulative, opaque and exclusive on-line as we can in the corridors of our high school. (Ain’t life grand?!) Figuring out these forces, and what it means for the structure and integrity and efficiency of networks, is part of Barabasi’s charge, and part of what makes his book so delightful to read.
Here are some of the things about networks that I didn’t know:
1. Sociologists estimate that we know between 200 and 5,000 people by name. Something called a Poisson distribution tells us that, in a world of 6 billion people, most of us have roughly the same number of friends and acquaintances. This, in turn, has led scientists to their “six degrees of separation,” a famous 1967 study by Harvard professor Stanley Milgram in which he wanted to find the “distance” between any two people in the United States.
Through an old-style, arduous, snail-mail technique, Milgram found that the medium number of intermediate persons between any two in the U.S. Hollywood
(Did you click on that link? You did. I know.)
2. Mark Granovetter’s 1972 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, determined—are you ready?—that “when it comes to finding a job, getting news, launching a restaurant, or spreading the latest fad, our weak social ties are more important than our cherished strong friendships.” In fact, managers are apt to hear about a new job opening more from their weak ties (27.8%) than their strong (16.7%). It turns out our close friends have networks that tend to mirror our own. Only by busting-out can we link to the kind of broader audience we might need in order to launch a new coffee shop or sell our latest invention.
3. To further the Animal Farm analogy, there are sprinkled among us a handful of people “with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are ‘connectors.’” Connectors are critical to networks—“they create trends and fashions, make important deals, spread fads, or help launch a restaurant. They are the thread of society, smoothly bringing together different races, levels of education, and pedigrees.”
4. We now know that hubs and connectors are everywhere—cocktail parties, Hollywood
5. Vilfredo Pareto, an avid gardener, developed his 80/20 rule by noting that 80% of his peas were produced by 20% of his peapods. Now you know.
Putting all this together, Barabasi concludes that real networks are governed by two laws: growth and preferred attachment. As nodes grow in networks, they prefer to link to nodes that have more links. There’s no democracy about it, no real leavening effect. We all link to TMZ to see what happened to Tiger Woods yesterday. We just can’t help it.
I have but two issues with the book. First, it feels dusty and dated, even though it was published less than a decade ago. That’s not Barabasi’s fault—it’s just the nature of technological change. (In fact, Linked is almost a museum piece. It describes NEC’s 1999 study of search engines when it found that Northern Light covered 16% of all documents on the web, HotBot and Alta Vista where at 11% and 15% respectively, and Google could index only 7.8% of the estimated 800 million pages on the web. How soon we forget.)
The second issue with the book, and for this I need to blame Barabasi (cause I have nobody else to blame but myself): I still don’t know what to do with LinkedIn!
(P.S.—Those of you with 2-4 year olds may recognize the title of this article as a riff on Pigs Aplenty, Pigs Galore!, one of the great kids books, even if you have to read it 1500 times.)
(P.P.S—Gladwell needs no apologist. I wish he would find my stuff and write about it in his next million-seller.)
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