NETWORKS ARE SURPRISINGLY RESILIENT BECAUSE THEY ARE NETWORKS, NOT HIERARCHIES

According to ScienceDaily, researchers Mark Newman and Valdis Krebs have mapped networked political communities in the blogosphere and from Amazon and discovered that political networks can become so “tight” in terms of internal links that they resist becoming fragmented:

“When analyzed using Newman’s method, the network of books separated into four communities, with dense connections within communities and looser connections between them. One community was composed almost entirely left-wing books, and the other almost entirely of right-wing ones. Centrist books comprised the other two categories. The computer algorithm doesn’t know anything about the books’ content—it draws its conclusions only from the purchasing patterns of the buyers—but Newman’s analysis seems to show that those purchasing patterns correspond closely with the political slant of the books.

“It is particularly interesting to note that the centrist books belong to their own communities and are not, in most cases, merely lumped in with the liberals or conservatives,” the paper stated. “This may indicate that political moderates form their own purchasing community.

In another example, Newman used the algorithm to sort a set of 1225 conservative and liberal political blogs based on the network of web links between them. When the network was fed through the algorithm, it divided cleanly into conservative and liberal camps. One community had 97 percent conservative blogs, and the other had 93 percent liberal blogs, indicating that conservative and liberal blogs rarely link to one another. In a further twist, the computer analysis was unable to find any subdivision at all within the liberal and conservative blog communities.

“This behavior is unique in our experience among networks of this size and is perhaps a testament not only to the widely noted polarization of the current political landscape in the United States, but also to the strong cohesion of the two factions,” the paper stated. The network of blogs was compiled by another U-M professor, Prof. Lada Adamic of the U-M School of Information.”

The implications here are very interesting, both good and bad. First the bad:

Of immediate concern, it would seem that in terms of its political partisans, America is on a trajectory for the kind of mutually hostile, mutually self-isolating, societal dynamic that is so often seen preceeding civil wars. Or for that matter, our own Civil War, where intense sectional feelings destroyed the Whig and Democratic Parties and nearly the United States along with them. It would also seem that the alienation of moderates and independents from the two major political parties is ” condensing”. Meaning that no matter who wins elections, it is a conceivable that a majority of the population, if not the voters, would regard the winner as illegitimate.

This utter resistance to communication, engagement or dialogue with the ” other” is actually a form of resilience taken to an unhealthy extreme. Sort of an ideological immune response to prevent ” invaders” – links – from connecting to ” the network”. Socially, one example of this behavior can be seen in the comments sections of many blogs where some “regulars” act as enforcers of the party line, parroting pet phrases (whether or not they actually make sense in terms of relevance) and using ad hominem abuse to attempt to smother dissenting views.

Now for the good:

4GW thinkers and Global Guerilla theorist John Robb have been acutely attentive to fragmentation and reversion to primary loyalties – or going toward an even greater breakdown that John has described as “ granular“. I agree with Robb that this phenomenon is happening and it is a powerful, entropic force, but how might it be prevented or reversed ?

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