No Comments Written by Robert on June 5, 2008 – 6:41 am

Network theory, generally, has come to prominence only in the late twentieth century, and its rise parallels the growth of the World Wide Web one of the most visible examples of a network.

From terrorist organizations to brain functions, from community building to business models, researchers are discovering powerful new explanatory possibilities for network theory across diverse social and organizational enterprises.

Whether orchestrated or self-organizing, the powerful collaborative potential that networked practices embody hold the possibility to reframe every step of how things are created, from their conception, design, and evaluation through to their production, distribution, and eventual consumption.

Research into networks has also shed light on the commonly understood meaning of “networking,” the use of one’s connections to further professional advancement.

For example, if one is comprised of “strong ties” (close companions) and “weak ties” (more distant acquaintances), then research that Mark Granovetter conducted showed that it is the “weak” ties that are the more critical links in securing new jobs. It is these weak ties, also, that serve as the key to understanding the “small-worlds” phenomenon, a dramatic illustration of the power of networks to link efficiently two distant nodes. “Small worlds” describes the common experience of meeting someone you don’t know but finding out that you have a random acquaintance in common.

Stanley Milgram’s research in the 1960s showed that through the surprising effectiveness of weak links one could connect together any two people in the United States by 5.5 intermediate steps, spawning the popular notion of “six degrees of separation.”

A network, however, is not just a simple accumulation of links. It must be distinguished from other, hierarchically organized structures with dramatically different properties. Hierarchical structures, such as those in the military or in vertically integrated corporations, place greater emphasis and give priority to the decision making of those at or nearer to the top of the pyramid (Integration).

The chain of command is centralized at the apex and works its way down to the lowest-level producers, who are often unaware of the rationale for decisions made elsewhere. In a network organization, however, there is no centralized command structure, and input comes from and moves to anywhere in the network.

Decentralized networks do exhibit clustering, however, which is the tendency for some nodes to gather more connections than other nodes, and to emerge as centers of intense activity. For certain kinds of tasks, though, researchers are showing that networks can be both more efficient and more effective in circulating information and producing collaboratively.

The ability to collaborate virtually on projects in parallel aided by electronic file sharing has significant ramifications for the design process.

It means that rather than having a single designer author a project, multiple and possibly thousands of designers, users, and consumers can potentially contribute meaningfully as well (Collaborative Design). While seemingly unrealistic, it is this model that produced Linux, an Open Source operating system that has captured substantial market share in business and industry.

The Open Source model is a novel, collaborative way of designing computer code. Rather than dividing up the code into rational subcomponents and hierarchically assigning the lower-order tasks to entry-level code writers (as was typically done in the computer business), the Open Source model distributes authoring potential to anyone anywhere in a network who is invested enough to work on whatever problems they choose.

By circulating and versioning the written code through recursive and iterative cycles, the code begins to take on the best characteristics of its thousands of co-creators’ contributions. While not always pure examples of networking, Open Source is emerging as a viable alternative to traditional, hierarchically organized ways of designing software.

The potential of networks to empower users to create and produce as exemplified in phenomena such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia represents a radical shift from centralized, Fordist production to networked, user-driven innovation.