Cathy Wang

The idea of hub exists not only in the social network; moreover, it can be considered in an online space. Even though it is suggested by Barabasi that hub is nautrally formed, the question of “can we create hub?” emerged in my mind.

As I previously suggested, I have noticed the “key person” or the connector in a social context where a person that connects different clusters together. To think of the idea of hub in a cyberspace context, we can consider yahoo as a hub because there are so many page pointed to yahoo. If we were to create a person as a connector in a society, we would have to push the person to a very social level. (The example of social climbers who try to meet all different people all the time can be considered a creation of … Read More »

we have noticed the preferential attachment law in application while we search on google. It is more likely that we click the hub.

I have found this other search engine (it’s a beta version and it does not search too well) called eurekster. This search engine would make the links that your friends linked to already on top. In a sense it’s an anti-preferential attachment. In another sense, it is creating its own preference. Instead of following the real hub, this search engine enables you to create your own hub in your own personal network.

I found this article called Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps” by marie-Laure Ryan throught the Patrik’s Sprawl (which is an amazing blog that I read everyday and would recomment everyone to read everyday.) From this article:

Despite these obvious differences between real and virtual geographies, the cyberspace metaphor invites us to think of the Internet as forming a parallel universe made of countless galaxies, planetary systems within these galaxies, worlds within these systems, and nations within these worlds. [1] The image of cyberspace produced by Andrew Wood, Nick Drew, Russell Beale and Bob Hendley [2] (figure 1) is a good example of this mental visualization.

Chomsky proposed that there are two kinds of people. One where they shapes our society and one where they do what they have been told. I suppose the old economy has resulted in a lot of people from the second group, which supports the concept where readers will consume news without question.

If it corresponds to my theory of fractal democracy and we apply the adoptability of hubs into this issue, we can see that the most of the people are late majority. The people that really shape the society are the hubs, the first adopters, the early majority.

The old top-down network with media telling us what the news is and controlling our thinking will be similar to a centralized network. The central hub will be the media, which will be the only source that distributes news to us.The new journalism … Read More »