This week we read an excerpt from a book called Six Degrees written by Duncan Watts. I really enjoyed his writing style and how he presented his ideas. The excerpt was called "The Connected Age" in which Duncan describes ideas such as emergence and the six degrees of separation. He also talks about a new kind of science that is growing called the science of networks. Reading this article made me think about how "small" our world really is and how we are all connected either through connections with people or through technology.

In Bobby's blog post from last week, he described how many of the things that supposedly make our lives "easier" really end up making our lives more stressful. I agree with this in some ways, but I think that if used in the correct way, most inventions really do provide convenience and less stress. If people get too caught up in technology or computers and have their whole entire life depend on it, if one little thing goes wrong, they are out of luck. However, I don't think that anyone can argue that electricity or computers make our lives more stressful. Duncan writes about a couple electricity failures on the east and west coast and how horrible it was for the cities to be out of power for a day or so. Yes, I am sure this was a very stressful couple of days, but I think that anyone would rather end up having a day of stress once in a blue moon, than not having electricity almost everyday of their lives. This example sort of leads into Duncan's description of emergence.

Emergence is when many different things interact and hence become something new. A tiny bit of electrical energy is not really anything, but if you combine a lot of energy together you can end up with a huge city. I think that another great example of emergence is a developing fetus. Each cell in and of itself doesn't look like anything, but after nine months all of these cells create a human being! The hard thing about emergence Duncan says, is that, "the parts making up the whole don't sum up in any simple fashion. Rather they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behavior." To understand emergence, a new science is emerging called the "science of networks". Scientists from all different specialties must come together in order to solve problems. I think this type of science sounds very difficult because so many different types of people are going to have to work together. This is probably why people view "interdisciplinary" scholars as so valuable.

The last part of this reading was about the six degrees of separation. This theory says that everyone is connected to everyone else by just six people. I think this idea is very thought provoking but is also a little hard to believe. I can understand how you are probably connected to anyone in the US by six degrees, but a tribal person in the mountains of South America? What if that tribe has not even had other human contact? Or think about all the people in China....I feel like you would have to go through a lot of people to get to some random person. Have they actually tested this? Like drawn two random peoples names and tried it out, or is it just a theory based on numbers? It is something to think about though.