This week, we read an article by Duncan Watts entitled “The Connected Age.” I found this article to be very interesting and thought provoking. I thought about how Watts said that in our day and age we have accumulated a vast number of devices and services to make our lives better and easier. While this seems undoubtedly true, I started thinking that these things could, in fact, make our lives more busy and stressful. It seems like these days, everyone is on their blackberry or cell phone, scurrying around, always in a hurry. Things in the past just seem more simple and laid back. It seems like pretty ironic that the inventions and services designed to make our lives easier might actually be the stress bringers that we’ve been trying to avoid.
I also enjoyed the part about the electrical network. I never really thought about the fact that we have a monstrous grid of power lines that allow us to do everything that we’re used to doing. Watts wrote about a 25-hour blackout in New York City in 1977. Riots busted out and millions of dollars in damages were accrued. It made me feel pretty scared to think about what might happen today, in an age when we’ve relied on electronics like never before. Watts then told of a huge power outage on the west coast in 1996. This one was more of a chain of events. One power line touched a tree, causing it to blow. This put stress on other power lines, causing them to blow, and so on. It was nice just reading some stories in this article. I liked not trying to have to interpret what the author meant, but merely hearing a tale. Watts also talked about how the individual parts of power aren’t too hard to understand, but it’s the system as a whole that is extremely complex and unpredictable. This is much the same as a crowd of football fans or stock market investors. I found this idea especially interesting. It seems counter intuitive that we could understand everything about individual parts of a system, but the system as a whole can still boggle our minds. It seems like connecting people, ideas, or things together can have consequences that we could never dream of.
1 comment:
You broke down a lot of what Watts was saying but I think a crucial thing you still missed was that he was making sure we didn't ignore the interactions between the individuals in these networks. These networks, systems, or whatever you want to call them are so complex because the individuals are so complex but studying the patterns of these networks does put an understanding in our inderdependancy and interconnectedness.
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