Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

Amazon.com
You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they're being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest. For instance, in a short bit on "coercive externalities," Watts sums up sociological research showing that:

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this remarkable book, Duncan Watts, one of the principal architects of the new science of networks, lays out nothing less than a new way to understand our connected planet. Between the Internet and e-mail, cell phones and satellites, friends and family, highways and airports, we are continuously surrounded by and subjected to a world of networks -- often bewilderingly so. Whether they bind computers, economies, or terrorist organizations, networks are everywhere in the real world, yet until recently the fundamental nature of the networks themselves has remained shrouded in mystery. However, in the past few years, Watts and others have spearheaded a new generation of research that is rapidly revealing the rules by which networks grow, the patterns they form, and the way in which they drive collective behavior. From epidemics of disease to outbreaks of market madness, from people searching for information to firms surviving crisis and change, from the structure of personal relationships to the technological and social choices of entire societies, Watts weaves together a network of discoveries across the academic spectrum, from physics to sociology, to tell the story of an explosive new science, the people who are building it, and his own peculiar path through it all.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Watts, a Columbia University sociology professor, combines his own research in network theory with summaries of the work of others who he says are "collectively solving problems which cannot be solved by any single individual or even any single discipline." The result is a dizzyingly complex blend of mathematics, computer science, biology and social theory that, despite the best efforts at clarification, often remains opaque, buried in scientific language and graphs. The book also assumes a high level of unfamiliarity on the reader's part with the subject, treating phenomena like the 17th-century tulip craze or the "Kevin Bacon game" as fresh news. Even more surprising, however, are the significant omissions- there is not a single mention of "tipping points," for example, the subject of a recent bestselling book. The parts of the book dealing with the author's own research are strong on science, but frustratingly vague on the social network of scientists with whom Watts has worked. There are intermittent highlights in the scientific account, such as an explanation of why casual acquaintances are more likely to provide life-changing opportunities than best friends, or a look at how New York City's reaction to September 11 illustrates current thinking on network connectivity and disruption, but, despite an admirable effort to syncretize discoveries in several fields, the book as a whole is too dry to compete effectively with the popularized accounts that exist for each separate field. Illus. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Columbia sociology professor Watts sums up his groundbreaking work on the networks, from computers to terrorist cells, that shape contemporary life. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

One of its young pioneers explains the rudiments of network theory, a science almost too new to have a name.

As an example of the complexity of networks, Watts (Sociology/Columbia Univ.) takes the 1996 western US power-grid failure, caused largely by the very safety features meant to prevent a blackout. The nature of a network is determined not by its individual members, the author reminds us, but by their connectedness. The title alludes to the proposition that each of us could communicate to anyone else on earth with no more than six intermediate steps--preposterous at first glance, considering that most of us stay within a small circle of acquaintances. But, as Watts points out early on, even a small degree of randomness in the network, such as one neighbor with out-of-town friends, makes for a high degree of interconnectedness among its parts. He details the research by mathematicians, biologists, physicists, and others that has led to the understanding that networks, whether of people, computers, or even the neural cells of nematode worms, have structural features in common. And while one might sneer at the insights of physicists into human behavior, a key breakthrough in network theory was the recognition that certain structures are universal. The mechanism that starts a large crowd clapping in unison without any signal also lets all the crickets in one meadow synchronize their chirping. Computer viruses spread in much the same way as the flu. Watts smoothly combines a historical survey of the field with real-world examples, often drawn from his personal experience. An extensive bibliography, graded by degree of mathematical sophistication, will be useful to those readersinterested in pursuing the subject further.