I just finished reading Mark Buchanan’s Small Worlds: Uncovering Nature’s Hidden Networks, published in the US as Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002).

Buchanan’s prose is accessible and spiced with just enough wit to keep the reader engaged, and keeps this a smooth read. The book’s also a great primer on the field of complexity science, tracing its trajectory from Milgram’s early experiments right across the disciplines, including detailed coverage of the work of such pillars of network theory as Granovetter and Barabasi.

There is some striking ambivalence, though. Buchanan, a PhD physicist by training, engages in what I can only describe as the bigotry of the hard sciences on the nature of evidence and truth claims, "objectivity", and verifiable research – the sort of thinking that presupposes there is no evidence absent hard mathematics to back it up (which is irritating in the extreme for a field of research that’s making claims on social phenomena).

Buchanan doesn’t exactly dismiss social sciences out of hand, and curiously, he’s almost reverent of historical method when it comes to dealing with particulars rather than generalizables. But his verbiage hints at condescension (toward some social science suppositions) and apprehension (that the answers to some of those those pesky unexplained elements of networks, alas, sigh…. may lie in the social sciences), when it isn’t engaging in idol-worship (the tyranny of numbers!).

I’m skeptical. Aggregate studies are useful, of course, and theories on the "naturally occuring order" of network architecture – the Godhand – are fascinating.  But  I don’t want to believe that individual human agency is a secondary or irrelevant phenomenon to collective dynamics.

 

Two really interesting items in the latest Harper’s. Full citations with links as follows:

Richard Rodriguez, "The God of the Desert: Jerusalem and the Ecology of Monotheism," Harper’s Magazine Vol 316, No. 1892 (January 2008): 35-46.

John Gray, "Faith in Reason: Secular Fantasies of a Godless Age," Harper’s Magazine Vol 316, No. 1892 (January 2008): 85-88.

Rodriguez’ piece is participant narrative. Gray’s essay is a review of recent books on contemporary and historical problems of secularism by Charles Taylor, Olivier Roy, and Mark Lilla. The TLS  had something similar from early December 2007: Jon Habgood, "God Debates: The So-Called New Atheism is Little More Than a Step Backwards to the Old-Fashioned Atheism,"  Times Literary Supplement  (12 Dec 2007).

Rodriguez associates the desert with emptiness, and Jerusalem, "at the centre of the world", with both; his "curiosity about an ecology that joins three desert religions" dating "from September 11, 2001, from prayers enunciated in the sky over America on that day." He simultaneously bridges and parses naturally occuring worlds and their human-constructed outgrowths, eliciting a fascinating broad-stroke panorama of symbol and paradox:

Those divisions generate boxes, some authentic and some not – their razed and vacated contents metaphors for Jerusalem’s own surrounding ecological context:

The desert is also emblematic, of monastic asceticism, of a dead language, of gaps and cracks in the built world:

The concentric elisions of Jerusalem in the desert – empty urban spaces sprouting from an environmental void – are a twinned and attenuated ecological vacuum in which human communities, amazingly, still manage to coalesce and thrive. One of Rodriguez’s informants describes this locus of activity as "the umbilicus", he notes, "by which term he means the concentration of God’s intention on this landscape." Shades of network theory. "Underfoot," he continues, punctuating the conversation with anecdotal meaning, "is a large anthill – a megalopolis – then a satellite colony, than another, then another, the pattern extending across the desert floor."

Rodriguez’ interpretation is useful, I think, for its discussion of ecology as something more than just a contextual accumulation of the elements. Understanding the primal environmental impetus to belief formation and concept development is especially salient to getting at the foundations of more-or-less mature ideological systems, and an obvious lynchpin for unpacking processes of radicalization. But I’d hesitate to go so far as to suggest that Rodriquez’ landscape of the barren, of the hyper(un)real, reduces the complex to the simple.

This was interesting: "Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy," New Yorker (12 Nov 2007). It looks at the sometimes less than rigorous inner workings of criminal profiling. Fascinating. Its author, Malcolm Gladwell, takes a good hard swipe at the practice, and generally demystifies the sort of analytical gobbledygook that can caveat any argument out of being especially right or wrong. Gladwell probably overstates the case, but makes a good point: beware the BS artist in investigator’s clothing, professing metaphysical insights into the ways of the badman.

The Economist ‘s recent science and technology special published some of the most interesting, and sensible, items I’ve seen in a while on the interface between the virtual and the real. Two articles, "Playing Tag" and "Reality, Only Better", reviewed mobile social network platforms and augmented reality technology, respectively.

The leader item, "Better Together", summed up the early utopian and anarchic glee surrounding the chaos and ungovernability of the internet, when "the idea that it represented an entirely new and separate realm, distinct from the real world, was seized upon by both advocates and critics of the new technology."

Advocates, The Economist writes, "liked the idea that the virtual world was a placeless datasphere, liberated from constraints and restrictions of the real world, and an opportunity for a fresh start."

Critics of the internet’s fantasy-land separation of virtual from real "worried that people were spending too much time online, communing with people they had never even met in person in chat rooms, virtual game worlds and, more recently, on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook."

But new technology overlays have pushed things forward, as they always do. "The internet has not turned out to be a thing apart," argues The Economist. "Unpleasant aspects of the real world, such as taxes, censorship, crime and fraud are now features of the virtual world, too. …At the same time, however, some of the most exciting uses of the internet rely on coupling it with the real world."

The merger of real and virtual is fascinating, though The Economist has stayed on the social and cultural side of this particular technological median, bypassing its nastier surveillance society implications, at least for now. It notes:

Social networking allows people to stay in touch with their friends online, and plan social activities in the real world. The distinction between online and offline chatter ceases to matter. Or consider Google Earth, which puts satellite images of the whole world on your desktop and allows users to link online data with specific physical locations. The next step is to call up information about your surroundings using mobile devices–something that is starting to become possible. Beyond that, "augmented reality" technology blends virtual objects seamlessly into views of the real world, making it possible to compare real buildings with their virtual blueprints, or tag real-world locations with virtual messages.

Personally, I like the idea of being able to switch on my mobile at a party in Paris, scan locally for any available profiles, review the approriate hottie’s online specs, and get right into it. Skip the awkward preliminaries, after reading through our digital social CVs. "Hiya," I can say to the cutie out back, leaning on the terrace railing. She can smile in recognition, though we’ve never "met".

-"Facebook, right?"
-"Last week… yes!! How ARE you?!"
-"This party sucks. What say we blow this joint?"
-"Oh, I can’t, I’m the designated driver, I need to stick around."
-"No worries – let’s just import some detail from this wild restaurant in Marakesh I was in last year."

Geohacked social networking fused with augmented reality services is going to change a few things, not the least of which will be social networking itself. The health benefits are also pretty hefty: medical referrals, treatment, and follow-up, all moderated through a virtual portal at the hands of a specialist two continents away, through the hands of a specialist locally resident, for example.

On a flight in mid-November, I managed to stay awake long enough to read through a great piece of magazine writing, Walter Kirn’s "The Autumn of the Multitaskers," The Atlantic (Nov 2007), p. 66-80.

It’s all the buzz in the blogosphere (OK, so what isn’t?). Blog of Rand goes into it in more depth, and notes the irony, for anyone interested in reading the whole article, that full text is "NOT online – go figure. The one article that the overly-wired need to read can only be read in print or online by subscribers."

I’ve read the likes of it before: railing against the scattered tugs and pulls of tech-connected culture, and the price we pay for bothering to try to manage it all instead of just focusing on something, anything.

What got my attention wasn’t the thrust or fluff of it, even though it’s one of those smooth, languidly composed narratives that’s a delight to read. It was one of the piece’s many linked tangents, on the spatialization of wired life. Recalling the ascent of digitization and quick communication in the early 1990s, Kirn writes:

We all remember the promises. The slogans. They were all about freedom, liberation. Supposedly we were in handcuffs and wanted out of them. The key that dangled in front of us was a microchip.

"Where do you want to go today?" asked Microsoft in a mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations – some geographic, some social, some intellectual – that you could reach in milliseconds by loading the right devices with the right software. It was further insinuated that where you went was purely up to you, not your spouse, your boss, your kids, or your government. Autonomy through automation.

This was the embryonic fallacy that grew up into the monster of multitasking.

Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms like Microsoft could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. A product for which they could raise the demand by refining its features, upping its speed, restyling its appearance, and linking it up with all the the other products that promised freedom, too, but had replaced it with three inferior substitutes that they could market in its name:

Efficiency, convenience, and mobility.

For the proof that these bundled minor virtues don’t amount to freedom but are, instead, a formula for a period of mounting frenzy climaxing with a lapse into fatigue, consider that "Where do you want to go today?" was really manipulative advice, not an open question. "Go somewhere now," it strongly recommended, but always go, go, go – and with our help. But did any rebel reply, "Nowhere. I like it fine right here"? Did anyone boldly ask, "What business is it of yours?" Was anyone brave enough to say, "Frankly, I want to go back to bed"?

Maybe a few of us. Not enough of us. Everyone else was going places, it seemed, and either we started going places, too – especially to those places that weren’t places (another word they’d redefined) but were just pictures or documents or videos or boxes on screens where strangers conversed by typing – or else we’d be nowhere (a location formerly once known as "here") doing nothing (an activity formerly labeled "living"). What a waste this would be. What a waste of our new freedom.

Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task – and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask – of trying to be free.

Right. Running to stand still. Liminal life in the digital desert. The physical, human, and cognitive terrain of modern, digitized, semtex-amped existenz.