There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena. Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure. Scott Feld's Rule (I'm more likely to make friends with someone who has more friends than me). Cascading behaviors (i.e., virality). Small world phenomena (those 6 degrees of separation). In all, a series of social forms that complicate typical binarisms like individual v. group. Instead, these behaviors are simply networked--explicable through linked nodes. In other words, not an 'individual'; but not an amorphous, superstructural group. These have all kinds of implications for social action, cognition, identity and feeling. As Sampson (2012) writes, Decision are not, as such, embedded in people, or in the voluntary exchanges with others, but in the very networks to which they connect. It is, like this, the network relation that leads the way. (168) But what happens when more and more of our p...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.