week9 RN: The web of life of communication networks

Finished the last chapters of Monge & Contractor, and again felt the need to go back over the skipped chapters on math models... :) A good part of inspiration was presented where they were discussing about the future network forms of organizing, referring to examples such as open source and p2p. Though the discussion was a little too optimistic/naive in my perpective, it gave me a good direction on what aspects to see in dealing with those subjects. Also liked the part that "minor changes can have dramatic changes in the global structure of the network"; however, I got really curious on what those changes will be like. Given that the mission or the role of the organization in a greater network requires some greater forces to change, is it that individual nodes change but will be restored to its former structure? or rather, is the structure itself often very prone to change as result of the changing of nodes? In other words, how strong is the 'pattern' of the network in accordance with the individual nodes, under what conditions. Such questions come into my mind because I am interested in how to implement findings on the roles and principles of network structure to build reform strategies for already existing organizations; for example, how to change a network structure to balance the organizational democracy vs efficiency debate in online journalism groups. Or even of greater scales of democracy, when history has often proved that you can't gain democracy simply by beheading the dictator.

On the other hand, Capra's was a more 'warm' read, emphasizing how life itself is a function of an open network that includes the whole environment. Chaos thery is nothing new by now since Jurassic Park, but it was helpful to see how such views arose into the next paradigm. And I can say, that the process itself had a very 'ecological' nature, deriving from various influences and building up into a networked way of understanding(which unwittingly is the meaning of 'Tao', a keyword his previous book talked about). However, in matter of communication, or narrowly speaking 'media', I still need to think about how the communication system becomes an self-organizing ecology.