in CCR 711: Network(ed) Rhetorics
Note: Nothing much in this post. I’ve just linked some of the terms from this week’s readings to entries in wikipedia.

Among other items, we’re reading Chapter 3 and 4 from Bernardo Huberman’s The Laws of the Web on Evolution and Structure, and Small Worlds.

Huberman has figured out that despite the massively complex aspects of the Web, there are also regularities that can be predicted using models from physics (link ntoe: the chart under central theories is interesting); specifically, statistical mechanics, and nonlinear dynamics (link note: nonlinear dynamics redirects to chaos theory page because ct “deals with the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamial systems.”).

The nature of the Web actually has to do with patterns, distribution, dynamics, and collective behavior. The patterns that are observed can be described as a type of power law.

When it comes to the Web, it is “quite likely to find a site many times larger than the average size”…according to Humberman, and it’s also accurate to say that “the average behavior of the system is not typical” (27).
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