Updated 28 Dec 07 to add links.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also--being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate--somewhat shallow and empty.... especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme.
Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks--called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility.
Among the key points that the author discusses and which certainly make the book worth buying and reading, my above reservations not-with-standing:
1) Reductionism has driven 20th century science (and one might add, all other knowledge), with the result being that we have experts who know more and more about less and less--and )as CIA and FBI recently found)while leaving us devoid of generalists and multi-disciplinary artists and scientists who can "connect the dots" across these fragmented foci.
2) Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about networks being equally distributed and thus largely invulnerable to catastrophic meltdown, the author does a fine job of documenting the importance of selected "hubs", so important that their removal ultimately breaks the network down into isolated pieces. The functionality of the network, its strength, is also its weakness--vulnerability to deliberate attack against the hubs (the author does not mention the Internet domain directories except in passing while discussing a table error, but MAYEAST and MAYWEST would be two obvious directory hubs that could be better protected through replication).
3) The author inadvertently makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how to defend America against terrorism--discussing why no single authority can close down the Internet by fiat, he notes "The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible." LOCALLY GUARDED--this is the key phrase. Federalizing counter-terrorism, and using federal agents and computers at the state and local levels, will not be effective against terrorists in civilian guise within the homeland--only a complete extension of counterintelligence and counterterrorism methods to the state & local level--teaching them to fish for terrorists, rather than trying to catch the terrorists with federal trawlers, is the way to go.
4) The author flirts with what is known as nomadic computing, making the point that nodes built around individual people are becoming as important--some would say more important--in a networked economy than nodes built around static organizations. There is a useful general discussion of how "fitness" in a networked economy is a combination of speed and scalability as well as diversity of linkages. As a general rule, as the FBI found (and also CIA, INS, and the State Department), systems with a single hub resistant to initiative from the field offices will tend to be slow and ineffective.
Missing from this populist overview is a discussion of the vital importance of geospatial information. While the author helpfully notes the Earth is increasingly covered by an electronic "skin" with millions of measuring devices, with experts predicting that by 2010 there will "around 10,000 telemetric devices for each human on the planet" (one suspects this refers only to privileged humans, not the billions of dispossessed that lack telephones, never mind computers), he does not take the next essential step, which is to note that in the absence of an XML-GEO standard and a global push to associate geospatial as well as temporal tags with all data, much of what we collect will, like the trillions of bits we have collected with secret satellites, never get processed in a meaningful manner.
This is a helpful book that will be of value to the general reader at the elementary (adult) level.
See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for AllGroup Genius: The Creative Power of CollaborationCollective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in CyberspaceGlobal Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st CenturyOne from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic OrganizationThe Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and FreedomWorld Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series)The Wisdom of CrowdsAn Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
