Last week we read an excerpt titled “Viruses and Fads” written by Albert Barabas. I had an idea of how viruses may act similarly to fads from our previous reading by Duncan Watts. The main idea was that we are all connected to one another, and for this reason, real disease epidemics and things such as computer viruses spread so quickly. In Barabas’s writing he related the spread of fads and ideas to viruses.
The first example that Barabas used was the spread of AIDS to North America. The disease was largely influenced by one man named Gaetan Dugas. This one man had sexual contact with at least 2,500 people while infected with AIDS. Barabas then goes on to describe a cartoon by Mike Collins regarding the 2000 presidential election and its almost instantaneous popularity. In the excerpt, Barabas states that, “they are both examples of diffusion in a complex network”. At first you may think they are different because one spread very slowly and one had spread around the globe overnight, but in reality, the networks used are in essence the same. AIDS spread through a sexual network spanning many years and the cartoon spread through the huge network of computers. Another thing that the spread of viruses and fads have in common is a small group of people termed as innovators. These people are not afraid to take risks and they jump on the bandwagon of new ideas right away. They don’t wait for something to become popular and then just join in with the masses. Another group found in both cases is a group called the “hub”. This group consists of one or more people that interact/communicate with more people than does the average person. In the AIDS example, Dugas was considered a hub because he had much more promiscuous sexual relations than the average person.
In class we discussed the slogan “Keep Austin Weird”. It started off very small and then got into the hands of someone who decided to really get it off the ground. Today, other cities besides Austin are using the same slogan. The funny part of this fad is that Cingular used that slogan in an advertisement in Austin even though the whole point of the idea was to rebel against big corporations. It was a fad against the fad of big businesses like wal-mart. If plotted, it can be seen that the spread of a fad overtime takes the shape of a bell curve. However, as later described in the reading, computer viruses do not follow normal predictions from epidemic models. The Love Bug computer virus was the most damaging computer virus ever. It destroyed about 45 million computers worldwide and although there is now an antidote, it still exists today. The reason computer viruses behave unlike normal viruses/fads, is because computer viruses are not connected randomly. The AIDS epidemic is more related to the spread of a computer virus because people are not connected randomly and some people will be larger hubs than other people. In the case of “Keep Austin Weird” there was one main hub at the beginning that got it going and then everyone just followed.
Understanding the spread of ideas and fads can help us to understand the spread of diseases like AIDS. In this day in age, we are more connected to one another than any other time in history. For this reason, it is important to study how this new connective ness affects the laws of diffusion and the spread of things such as fads and viruses.
1 comment:
I don't know about you, but i think it's weird how someone compared the spread of a deadly virus to that of a computer virus. Sure it's the same concept, but is it really the same? People vs. computers dying? I think that this kind of shows how technologically dependent our society is; we'll happily take a dead man in California as long as our computer is still effectively running.
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