Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

Last updated

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (2004 in paperback, ISBN   0-393-32542-3 and 2003 in hardcover, ISBN   0-393-04142-5) is a popular science book by Duncan J. Watts covering the application of network theory to sociology.

The book covers Watts' own work on small-world networks, and continues on to cover scale-free networks, network searching, epidemics and network failures, social decision-making, thresholds in networks, and innovation in large organizations and its lack.

In addition to covering the theoretical models and empirical case studies, the book also includes several stories about the character of the researchers who developed this science and their relationships with each other.

The case studies used include blackouts in the North American electricity distribution network, the relationships among members of corporate boards of directors, the distribution of wealth in societies, peer-to-peer file-sharing systems, computer viruses, economic bubbles, and the 1997 Aisin fire crisis at Toyota.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer</span> Type of decentralized and distributed network architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Statistics</span> Study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data

Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social science</span> Academic disciplines concerned with society and the relationships between individuals in society

Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 19th century. In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, communication science and political science

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social dynamics</span> Study of behavior of groups

Social dynamics is the study of the behavior of groups that results from the interactions of individual group members as well to the study of the relationship between individual interactions and group level behaviors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symmetry</span> Mathematical invariance under transformations

Symmetry in everyday language refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance. In mathematics, "symmetry" has a more precise definition, and is usually used to refer to an object that is invariant under some transformations; including translation, reflection, rotation or scaling. Although these two meanings of "symmetry" can sometimes be told apart, they are intricately related, and hence are discussed together in this article.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Duncan J. Watts</span>

Duncan James Watts is a sociologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was formerly a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, and is known for his work on small-world networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic journal</span> Peer-reviewed scholarly periodical

An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research. They nearly-universally require peer-review or other scrutiny from contemporaries competent and established in their respective fields. Content typically takes the form of articles presenting original research, review articles, or book reviews. The purpose of an academic journal, according to Henry Oldenburg, is to give researchers a venue to "impart their knowledge to one another, and contribute what they can to the Grand design of improving natural knowledge, and perfecting all Philosophical Arts, and Sciences."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social network analysis</span> Analysis of social structures using network and graph theory

Social network analysis (SNA) is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of nodes and the ties, edges, or links that connect them. Examples of social structures commonly visualized through social network analysis include social media networks, memes spread, information circulation, friendship and acquaintance networks, business networks, knowledge networks, difficult working relationships, social networks, collaboration graphs, kinship, disease transmission, and sexual relationships. These networks are often visualized through sociograms in which nodes are represented as points and ties are represented as lines. These visualizations provide a means of qualitatively assessing networks by varying the visual representation of their nodes and edges to reflect attributes of interest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Small-world experiment</span> Experiments examining the average path length for social networks

The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "six degrees of separation", although Milgram did not use this term himself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network theory</span> Study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects

Network theory is the study of graphs as a representation of either symmetric relations or asymmetric relations between discrete objects. In computer science and network science, network theory is a part of graph theory: a network can be defined as a graph in which nodes and/or edges have attributes.

Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Small-world network</span> Graph where most nodes are reachable in a small number of steps

A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps. Specifically, a small-world network is defined to be a network where the typical distance L between two randomly chosen nodes grows proportionally to the logarithm of the number of nodes N in the network, that is:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Complex network</span> Network with non-trivial topological features

In the context of network theory, a complex network is a graph (network) with non-trivial topological features—features that do not occur in simple networks such as lattices or random graphs but often occur in networks representing real systems. The study of complex networks is a young and active area of scientific research inspired largely by empirical findings of real-world networks such as computer networks, biological networks, technological networks, brain networks, climate networks and social networks.

Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis is a peer-reviewed academic journal of Marxist scholarship. It covers economics, philosophy of science, historiography, women's studies, literature, the arts, and other social science disciplines from a Marxist point of view. As well as covering social and political theory, it includes first-order historical research.

Pluto Press is a British independent book publisher based in London, founded in 1969. Originally, it was the publishing arm of the International Socialists, until it changed hands and was replaced by Bookmarks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Watts–Strogatz model</span> Method of generating random small-world graphs

The Watts–Strogatz model is a random graph generation model that produces graphs with small-world properties, including short average path lengths and high clustering. It was proposed by Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz in their article published in 1998 in the Nature scientific journal. The model also became known as the (Watts) beta model after Watts used to formulate it in his popular science book Six Degrees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network science</span> Academic field

Network science is an academic field which studies complex networks such as telecommunication networks, computer networks, biological networks, cognitive and semantic networks, and social networks, considering distinct elements or actors represented by nodes and the connections between the elements or actors as links. The field draws on theories and methods including graph theory from mathematics, statistical mechanics from physics, data mining and information visualization from computer science, inferential modeling from statistics, and social structure from sociology. The United States National Research Council defines network science as "the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolving network</span>

Evolving networks are networks that change as a function of time. They are a natural extension of network science since almost all real world networks evolve over time, either by adding or removing nodes or links over time. Often all of these processes occur simultaneously, such as in social networks where people make and lose friends over time, thereby creating and destroying edges, and some people become part of new social networks or leave their networks, changing the nodes in the network. Evolving network concepts build on established network theory and are now being introduced into studying networks in many diverse fields.

In social network analysis, the co-stardom network represents the collaboration graph of film actors i.e. movie stars. The co-stardom network can be represented by an undirected graph of nodes and links. Nodes correspond to the movie star actors and two nodes are linked if they co-starred (performed) in the same movie. The links are un-directed, and can be weighted or not depending on the goals of study. If the number of times two actors appeared in a movie is needed, links are assigned weights. The co-stardom network can also be represented by a bipartite graph where nodes are of two types: actors and movies. And edges connect different types of nodes if they have a relationship. Initially the network was found to have a small-world property. Afterwards, it was discovered that it exhibits a scale-free (power-law) behavior.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social network</span> Social structure made up of a set of social actors

A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors, sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics.

References