Seed Salon: Albert-László Barabási + James Fowler
January 26th, 2009 — Michael Cayley“Barabási mathematically describes networks in the World Wide Web, the internet, the human body, and society at large. Fowler seeks to identify the social and biological links that define us as humans. In this video Salon, Barabási and Fowler discuss contagion and the Obama campaign, debate the natural selection of robustness, and ask: Is society turning inward?”
The “Is society turning inward?” question is misleading in my opinion. That headline does not really point towards the discussion that the scientists are having towards the end of this piece. That question makes me think of xenophobes and isolationist trade policies. In fact, the scientists are talking about the emergence of networking thinking as a dominant form in the 21st century. They believe that our best minds are increasingly focused on our interconnectedness rather unlike the last century of learning which was primarily focused on learning about particles from quarks to the galaxies & beyond.
Hat tip to Valdis Krebs for sharing this and these related links:
http://is.gd/hpKh PDF of Full Paper... http://is.gd/hpMo
The transcript is here.
January 26th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[...] have also posted this with some comments over at http://www.socialcapitalvalueadd.com because it is a great discussion of how network thinking is emerging as a dominant form in the 21st [...]