Untapped Networks
Technology Review,
Mar 11, 2003
The subject of this interview, Columbia University sociologist Duncan Watts, offers some insights worth sharing about the nature of software and networks. The Mircosoft approach to software design, he argues, is flawed because it's centralized and homogeneous. Even a small flaw - like the Code Red virus - takes down the whole system. Decentralized networks, by contrast, are not vulnerable because they offer multiple ways to do the same thing, multiple pathways, like the internet. "People have a local view of the world. I have my friends, and everyone else is 'out there' somewhere—I don’t know about them or care about them and certainly can’t affect them. The science of networks is the antithesis of that world view. You affect things out there and they affect you."
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