Taylor goes on to offer the network as antithesis to the grid’s thesis, but he offers it as a positive transformation. The other shoe never falls. That would be, What’s the dark side of the network? I don’t want to ask this as doomy and gloomy soul, but in service of understanding the Web. Almost everything we knew about the human brain (viz., neural networks) up to the fruition of brain imaging in the 1990s came from observing its pathologies. To ask this question is to ask for full knowledge.

Anarchy
This came up on our class list of terms. In the networks of heart cells it would be called fibrillation and could lead to cardiac arrest. However, anarchy seems more to describe a dissolution or disruption of the network, if not a catastrophic end state. It’s what the gridsters would call their loss of control. The Web seems more unruly than anarchic/chaotic, because social codes still act as a centripetal force to hold it together. Plus, it doesn’t have an overall project that requires absolute coordination. So what would the pathologies of the functioning network itself be?

Contagion
This concept is developed by Watts in Six Degrees. We want our good ideas to spread and we want to forge links that empower us. But there is plenty of cause to fear connecting to something infectious and undesirable: advertisers, stalkers, worms and viruses.

Paranoia
This strikes me as a perfect disorder for a connecting system. It is itself a form of negative connecting. Things connected with each other; threatening things connecting with me. On the Web, this might be any cluster. Who is reading my Web page or blog or lurking on a list? Who else is receiving the memo? Who is Googling me as I write? Who has my credit card number and medical records? How is the Patriot Act being enacted? In our centrifugal movement, we are putting ourselves out there, but who is reading us? Surveillance in the grid becomes fear of surveillance in the network.

Overconnectedness
Connection takes energy. In my experience, a small version of a power law, the trend is that connections lead to more connections and to more and more investments of energy. Were any of us more connected two years ago than we are right now? I just hope there isn’t a phase transition where the number of connections skyrockets. How connected can we become before we start to collapse? Furthermore, I am constantly offered connections (to worthy and interesting ventures) which I feel obligated to turn down by the dozens, simply because time is finite. Every one leaves me with a little twinge of guilt that I’m not fully engaging with my ever-expanding circle.

After my last post on "fatedness" and this, I promise I'll try to take up the next reading on a more festive note.