Cathy Wang

In the article from WolrdChanging Blog it talks about Fractal Democracy.

small numbers of people, let’s say somewhere around 7 form the base cell of the organisation. Out of these, the group agrees on who represents their group will the best, and these selected persons form together with others who are selected to form the same kind of grouping, and these people then select one out of their group which goes up to the next level, where the same thing happens again. This method of distributing the will of the people is guaranteed to be totally representative, because it is the collective decision which ultimately feeds up to the top level, which irons out all the kinks.

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 »

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.