Abstract discussion of network power and societal connectivity

feudal times and more distributed than it was in the most vibrant democracies. Network power, we might say, exists as a sort of skin or surface that ties together billions of points to each other and to vital, centralized cores. We know our world is filling with more and better and faster connected devices distributing themselves at an unmeasureably quick pace; but we are also breeding powerful centralized knowledge and computing basins. Biological research labs now engage in complex DNA analysis with powerful desktop tools (distribution), but to work efficiently, they demand fast reference to the patterns revealed only in immense genetic datasets (concentration). You can snap high quality videos with your phone (distribution); you share them with millions on a connected central stage like Facebook or YouTube (concentration). A financial engineer can architect a new and profitable trading instrument on his tablet (distribution), but his hopes for profit depend on instant connection to busy, price-setting markets were prices are set (concentration.) This sort of pulling, taffy-like web of ties between small (your watch) and big (connected data systems) stretches constantly. It’s what you need to picture when you think of an image of network power. The wired masses in Tahrir square, for instance, emerge like magic on some once-invisible surface that forms between their phones and powerful platforms like YouTube. Or: Hyper-linked terrorist groups appear from nearly nowhere, jerking recruits from suburban London bedrooms via massively connected messaging platforms. Recall Adam Smith’s line about the Enlightenment, how a commercial society was one in which every man had to become a merchant? Well, in our age of connection, every one of us is a node. We sit on that tense, stretched surface between center and periphery. When we say “connection changes the nature of an object,” this is the exact balance we have to comtemplate. “Social structures,” John Padgett and Walter Powell wrote in their masterful study of complex connected systems, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, “should be viewed more as vortexes in the flow of social life than as buildings of stone.”!°° This idea has some eerie implications: Every structure - congresses, universities, the company where you work, our minds even - is merely a temporary collection of relations. And of course those relations can change at any moment. The tension between concentration and distribution acts, in a sense, like an hydraulic jaw. It pries power out of older, once-legitimate hands. Consider the case of my father, a cardiologist. As a doctor he stands at the head ofa medical tradition run for thousands of years on the idea that the doctor is the center of your care. If you show up ata hospital on a stretcher with a flat-line on some heart monitor, my father’s decades of training and practice have always been your best hope. But today, nearly every patient he sees - even the ones he brings back from their black flat-line future - second-guesses him as soon as he’s out the door: Googling their disease, tapping into websites of mixed reliability, joining some online community of people with the same sickness while they still have tubes in their nose. Meanwhile, his ideas about your case are under quickening pressure: An 100 Padgett and Powell, p. 8 72 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018304