Networks rule the world. Take any organization: a corner
shop, a new venture, a gang of drug traffickers, the United
Nations, Google, the place you work. They are all networks, with
their own rules and values and ways of communicating. Everybody
belongs to networks and they make a huge difference to our lives -
to our happiness and to our opportunities. SUPERCONNECT looks at
how the successful and fortunate few behave - and shows that if you
want to be one of them, you have to play by the network rules.
Acquaintances, friends of friends, distant neighbours, random
encounters - all can put us in touch with new, different worlds
that bring big breaks or surprising sources of happiness. We are
becoming more and more connected - via the web, mobile phone
technology and global media. How does this affect us? And how can
we make the most of these connections?
目錄：
Authors’ Note
Preface
1 Authors of Our Own Success?
2 Do You Live in a Small World?
3 The Strength of Weak Links
4 The Superconnectors
5 Heaven, Hell and Hubs
6 Cyberspace – Brave New World?
7 Rolodex Roulette
8 Hub to Hub
9 The Network Structure of Ideas
10 Network Stars
11 The Business of Weak Links
12 Poverty, Urban Renewal and Gangsters
13 A Network Society
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index
From the Hardcover edition.
內容試閱：
CHAPTER ONE
AUTHORS OF OUR OWN SUCCESS?
Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and the unsettling
discovery that outside forces may determine success
Maximise the serendipity around you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hollywood, 1936
If you wanted to protest against the dehumanising effects of the
Industrial Revolution by projecting a single striking picture of
its oppression, how would you do it? In the movie Modern Times,
Charlie Chaplin came up with a timeless image – he placed himself
within a great revolving cog, as if inside a giant clock, part of a
great mechanised factory, and showed himself buffeted by the
wheel’s endless revolutions.
Although it was a new and powerful portrayal, Chaplin stood – or
rather, lay – in a great tradition of the ‘romantic’ railing
against industry and its enslaving machines, stretching back to
William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’. Writers such as Blake
contrasted the smelly, sordid slums of Manchester with the
contented cows and peasants painted a few years earlier by Thomas
Gainsborough against a bucolic background of haystacks, green
fields and gently rippling rivers.
But the romantics were better at poetry and painting than they
were at history. The truth was that very few British agricultural
workers in the eighteenth century enjoyed much freedom or what we
would today call ‘job satisfaction’; theirs was a hard life in
which they did what they were told, rarely had enough to eat, and
faced famine and starvation at regular intervals. That was why so
many people fled their rural slums to find work in the cities.
Nobody forced them to go. They went in droves because, however
awful life was in the mill towns, it was a great deal better than
in the countryside. Karl Marx knew this – he said that
industrialisation rescued workers from ‘the idiocy of rural
life’.
Even so, Chaplin’s fate in 1936 was essentially the same as that
of a mill worker in 1836, or a peasant in 1736, or at any earlier
time in human history. The ordinary person – a category which
includes the huge majority of humans since time began – had a
horrid, tedious, unsatisfying existence, with precious little say
in how to run his or her life.
This is very different from our experience today – so when did
the big change occur? Some say the Beatles reflected this change in
society, but the landscape had actually shifted a decade before
they arrived on the scene, with Hollywood marking and magnifying
the upheaval. In 1953 Marlon Brando played motorbike rebel Johnny
Strabler in The Wild One, and throughout America movie audiences
were electrified by the young star’s raw charisma and
assertiveness. Mothers, intoxicated and paralysed by Brando’s
animal magnetism, let their small children run up and down the
aisles, shouting, ‘Vroom-vroom!’ Two years later, Rebel without a
Cause introduced James Dean as high school gang leader Jim Stark,
portraying a teenage world of knife fights, drag racing, stolen
cars and death by speeding. The picture indelibly presented young
people at the centre of their own universe, existentially
responsible for their own destiny, heroically deciding how to live
. . . and how to die.
This really was something novel – individualistic youth culture.
And it happened not just in America, but in Britain and Europe; and
it cropped up in music, plays and books as well as films. The Beats
of the 1950s – with their poetry, long hair and propensity to drop
out, go on the road and experiment with drugs – prefigured the
hippies and punks of later decades. John Osborne’s ferocious 1956
play Look Back in Anger transformed English and American theatre,
introducing the foul-mouthed working-class antihero, the ‘angry
young man’. Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider came out in the same
year, highlighting the impact on society of many influential
outsiders, including Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka
and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The golden age of youthful individualism came to full fruition in
the sixties, with psychedelic drugs, music and lifestyles, student
revolts, and rejection of authority in every part of life. That
spirit of personal liberation was eventually transmuted by baby
boomers not just into new creative spheres but into business, which
became much more radical, decentralised, individualised and
personally rewarding. The grey-suited, white-shirted, conformist
‘organisation man’ gave way to colourful semi-hippy entrepreneurs,
doing their own thing, running their own show. Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak founded Apple Computer and launched the Macintosh during a
famous advertising slot in the 1984 Baseball World Series, in which
the new computer was touted as the rebel alternative to Big Brother
IBM. This was an explicit reference to George Orwell’s 1984, in
which Big Brother, the dictator modelled on Stalin, crushed the
spirit of Winston Smith, the ordinary citizen whose sole crime was
to explore his individuality. Steve Wozniak later used the fortune
he made from Apple to subsidise his favourite rock bands, before
starting another high-tech venture.
Individualism – painful and pointless as it could often be –
replaced the image of the hapless victim crushed by the heartless
organisation. Since then the view that everyone can take charge of
their life, realising their own success and happiness, has had a
good run, becoming pretty universal. Don’t you feel that you have a
self, that you have inner depths, in almost the same way that you
have arms and legs? Don’t you feel that your personality can be
developed in any way that you choose, that you can rise above
whatever your parents achieved or strike out on new, personal
paths? In our society, ‘I did it my way’ is not just a line from a
song but the title of endless autobiographies, because we feel an
automatic identification with the individualist, the maverick, the
rebel. Everything has become personalised – we have personal
computers, personal trainers, personal iPods. This is a universe
away from Chaplin’s revolving wheel, and the fate of humanity
generally down the ages.
But here’s the thing. Just as control by society was replaced by
control by the self, another huge change is coming – indeed, it is
already here, but we are only beginning to appreciate it. Consider
this for a moment – when youth culture catapulted around the world,
often in highly subversive ways and without the help of official
media, how did the same dirty jokes and sexual lore suddenly turn
up everywhere, decades before the Internet had been invented? How,
in 1968, did identikit student revolts spread from California to
Paris to Tokyo and, in paler imitations, to thousands of other
campuses within a matter of days? The following year, how was it
that several hundred thousand young people suddenly converged on
the muddy fields of Woodstock, in the middle of nowhere, when there
was no advertising, no promotion, no television coverage? What is
the paradox of identical individualism, of feeling pressured to do
your own thing, of ‘groupthink’ masquerading as personal discovery?
How do fads – from hula-hoops to hoodies – explode and then fade
away?
The search for individual expression is genuine enough, but it
takes place within groups and it is spread by networks. And, in
many ways, networks are the antithesis of the lone individual. Even
when they are spontaneous and anarchic in origin, networks favour
big concentrations and bind people together in ways that no
individual intended or can control. The World Wide Web may be
democratic and open to all, but a few websites get the lion’s share
of its traffic, and a very small number of people get most of the
financial rewards, usually to their immense surprise. Nobody
intended that to happen; and nobody can prevent it. It’s just the
strange way of networks.
So it’s pretty clear that complete individualism is something of
a delusion. It’s important, it’s valid, it’s liberating and it’s
changed the world – mainly, in our opinion, for the better. But
it’s not the full picture. It’s not a reliable guide to how the
world works. To understand our world, we need a new way of thinking
– which is what this book aims to provide.
This time the academics – a new type of scientist – have already
done the heavy lifting for us. Now we should follow them into a
world where our individual efforts are only part of the picture, a
place where our success and happiness are determined by far more
than our own talents and achievements. This is still a world of
individuals, but it’s also a world of networks – the hidden
background that shapes our lives. It’s a strange land, puzzling and
confounding, but it’s also very exciting. Whereas the heroic
individualism of Dean and Brando gives us the illusion of
determining our fate, the new territory we’re about to explore
shows the strings that are tugging us this way and that. By
understanding the real nature of our world, by cooperating with the
network forces around us and harnessing them to our ends, we can
swap the delusion that we can control the world as individuals for
the reality of creation, in collaboration with other people. When
we understand our century’s network society properly, we can run
our lives slightly differently and benefit enormously. For example,
we’ll see that maintaining a large circle of casual acquaintances
who come from different backgrounds with contrasting attitudes and
lifestyles, or who live a long way from us, can provide knowledge
and insights that have the potential to change our lives. We’ll
also see how vital it is to choose the people we co...
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