[iDC] Reply to Abe Burmeister

[elw at stderr.org]

> codified. When you talk about the internet in the singular as if it was 
> one object, you can literally (albeit only with massive resources) prove 
> that the entire network is deliberately connected into one massive 
> entity. The only place you can prove that an ANT network is connected 
> together is in the texts of an ANT practitioner. That doesn't mean the 
> ANT network is imaginary though, and in fact where things get really 
> interesting is when you start looking at the mathematics of actual 
> networks, and realize that they are showing patterns very similar to 
> what we see in the real world. In particular I'm thinking about the work 
> of Albert-László Barabási which develops what could be called the 
> mathematics of radical inequality, while showing how a network like the 
> internet which had been expected to create a space of rather equal 
> distribution instead created a space where certain nodes (Google, Ebay, 
> Amazon, Yahoo and the like) dominate the landscape. These distribution 
> patterns are pretty much the same as what we see in other radically 
> unequal areas, most notably in income distribution, which Vilfredo 
> Pareto famously showed follows distribution in which 20% of most any 
> given population will control 80% of the income.
>
> So then what happens when you go back to ANT, which is at the moment 
> essentially an ethnographic/historical technique for doing sociology and 
> add network mathematics to the mix? It's not something I can even hope 
> to answer, but it also seems like something rather promising none the 
> less.

It would be interesting to hear your take on how this differs from typical 
social-network-analytic approaches.

I'm quite familiar with ANT, and with Barabasi (whose name I will not 
trouble myself to accent correctly), and with SNA, and I don't consider 
the conceptual jumps between any of these pieces to be overly large. 
Once you're adequately programmed to think in a network-centric mindset, 
the substitution of one set of entities for another - or actors of one 
scope for another - has always seemed to stop being particularly 
troublesome.

However - since you seem to be saying something slightly different - I 
think it would be interesting for you to explicate just what you think the 
issues are.

--elijah
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University, Bloomington