Cultural Transformations and Globalization by Alexander M Ervin

Author:Alexander M Ervin [Ervin, Alexander M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317261780
Google: RgZZCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-08T06:00:54+00:00

NETWORKS AND SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Once, I was waiting in an office for a lawyer who had been assisting in a local social movement and noticed a photo of him and Bill Clinton shaking hands. It turned out that they were at a Rhodes Scholars’ reunion at Oxford, where they had been classmates. This fairly well convinced me of the cliché that the world is joined together in networks through only as much as six levels of connection—knowing somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who finally knows somebody can get you eventually to everybody on the planet, if necessary.

This has become a serious domain of network study within social science containing the discoveries of that type of linkage and its many implications. Sociologist Duncan Watts’s (2003) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age is a good example of that approach in summary. Networks, here, are simply defined as nothing more than objects connected to one another in some fashion. With humans that can include the basics of friendship, stretching to the formation and interconnections of large organizations globally. Networks really do something—they are always sources of action, especially communication and decision-making. Networks are constantly evolving and changing to some degree and are self-constituting, emerging systems. Nonetheless, the science of networks is very difficult, especially in fully documenting the implications of six degrees of connections and the prediction of any results as they unfold. Certainly such networks have a lot to do with the way ideas disseminate, fashions change, people adopt new technologies, and, alas, diseases spread. Everybody has a network, some small, some large, and there are always connections that can link people into other networks, whether the ties there are potentially strong or weak. Internally, though, networks tend to be somewhat clustered in that most people have the same friends and acquaintances. Yet, we can always reach somebody beyond that cluster and become connected indefinitely. How this actually operates has become an interdisciplinary science involving not just sociology, psychology, and anthropology, but mathematics, computer science, and physics.

Among the interesting discoveries has been the strength of weak ties that implies that strong links only among individuals with similar traits, such as class, occupation, ethnicity, or religion, are not necessarily the best for transmitting innovation. The opposite may often be more useful in helping one to get a job or transmit a change. Having numbers of people in your network who are not like you or who do not share an intensity of interaction allows things, ideas, information, and so forth to jump relatively closed loops or networks and get to people who would otherwise not have access. They are also a way of conceiving links between individuals and groups in that they are created by individuals (Ibid.: 49).

What is the best way of looking at networks—structure or process? Watts suggests that there has been too much emphasis on structure, in that revealing networks have been a mechanism for exposing existing structures. That may be sometimes useful, for instance, if you want to assess the routes of transmission of a disease.

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