The following are his topic sentences in a section titled Faster Than A Speeding Blog, and I include only those because I think they set the tone for the underlying message of this article.

In the Internet age, that report in the Syracuse newspaper quickly reached far beyond upstate New York. Eleven minutes later a reader posted a comment, saying Mr. Churchill deserved to be shot in the face. Linking to a simple article from Syracuse had unleashed the power of hundreds of individuals, all using Google to add little bits of information. The blogs reached beyond the water cooler. Two days later, on January 28, as the story continued to gain momentum, readers of Freerepublic.com, another conservative Weblog, continued to talk about Mr. Churchill. That night the Churchill saga became a prime-time event when Bill O'Reilly led his talk show on the Fox News Channel by calling Mr Churchill "insane" and saying that Hamilton had no justification for giving him a public forum.

So bloggers, according to this reporter, were the catalyst that brought these "chickens home to roost." It was the rapid speed at which information could travel that brought so much backlash against Hamilton. And without the weblog traffic, this story may have never caught the attention of Bill O'Reilly, and therefore, it may have never received the public attention that it has. It seems as if Smallwood believes that the mass distribution of information, within this particular context, is the sole reason for Churchill's vilification. And the article ends with Mr. Klinkner, a professor of Political Science at Hamilton, stating:

You can forget about the notion of the ivory tower and that we can keep all these things in-house. Any piece of information that exists will get out. I don't think that's a bad thing. This was not good for Hamilton, but we need to acknowledge that we can no longer say, "No, we are going to play by our rules."

This brings me to Watts. The description of the dissemination of information here seems to be an example of a "group interlock network." The one article from The Post-Standard was taken to the web where it was broadcast for a specific readership to see. Yes, there is the possibility that others can read and comment on the information, but the information moves from one site to another through other bloggers (or nodes) that have to come in contact with the information at a particular place on the web. It may seem as if the presence of O'Reilly in this disrupts this reading, making this an example of a broadcast, where information is circulated to all at once. But I think there is something in this idea of context -- who will watch O'Reilly, who will be spurred to action by him -- that is important to note.

The use of the word "conservative" to distinguish the types of blogs where these transmissions were located, makes this system of an "affiliation network" because the readers of these blogs choose to participate because they share the context of being conservative with the author of the blog. (And yes, I know this is a bit reductive and others may go there too, so I am making this more cut-and-dry than it really is.) Therefore, it seems as if this presentation of the power of the web supports Watts' description of "bipartite networks" because their are actors and groups at work here. Bill O'Reilly is an actor who called Churchill "insane" but he belongs to a group of people (called conservatives in this article) who listen to him and spread similar sentiments.

So when Klinkner comments that the ivory tower is not an isolated space, he is correct, but his indecision about the good versus bad nature of information transmission is an interesting one. Yes, the transmission of information is a good thing -- in general, AND no, it was a bad thing for the specific group known as Hamilton College. Because of the differing levels of network affiliation, he can personally believe in the freedom of information transmission, but he recognizes as a member of the group that this particular instance was harmful.

Additionally, his claim that any information can be found at any time is true, but in the same sense, who is finding it and where it is being disseminated seems to be essential in deciding if the outcome is good or bad for anyone group. Therefore it is not just the "mass distribution of information" via weblogs that got Churchill into trouble, it was where that information was dispersed and how it was mediated that really matters.

I suppose this is not really a big TA-DA kind of post because I am still grappling with Watts' definitions. But I think that this article shows the complicated way in which information, context, and group affiliation weave together making it difficult to fully articulate how specific networks move. I also think it shows how technology is often seen as the harbinger of change without recognizing just how complex it is. It is not just the mass distribution of information that created this controversy. It was only when specific groups got hold of specific information that a conservative versus liberal drama ensued. But to look at this in terms of networks, instead of the power of the internet as a uniform thing, could possibly allow us to see just how integrated (or not) the academy really is.