Friday afternoon I was looking through my Inbox. The usual suspects included five newsletters. I am pretty choosy in the newsletters I subscribe to and these five are an unusually rich trove most Fridays. This was no exception.
As I was working my way through the links, tweeting and Google Plussing and emailing and sharing, I got this feeling…of…overwhelm-ment. So many links and so many forks from those links and so many folks and…well, you can see it in the embed below.
(By the way, I had a lot of trouble with the Google Doc embed below. I hadn’t done one in awhile and Google had ‘revised’ their look again so it took me a little while to figure out. And I discovered that if you click any link, it will open in the embed. So you don’t have to leave that space. I was a bit gobsmacked at how well and how seamlessly it worked. Meanwhile back to story.)
Almost seventy links, all high quality with links radiating from there as well like the one below:
And then more links forking from there:
All this reminds me of six degrees of separation and makes me ask, “How far is any link from any other link?” More importantly, what is the significance of this proximity, of this adjacent possibility? Help me out.
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From research I did in 2008, when MySpace was king with 110 million users, and that upstart Facebook had 60 million. In the intervening years since Barabási wrote Linked, I would argue the degrees have diminished even further.
“…the number of social links an individual can maintain has increased dramatically, bringing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six. Karinthy five. We could be much closer these days to three” (p. 39).
Barabási, A.-L. (2003). Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means. New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Now, I’m intrigued to read his updated edition…
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What is the significance of the degrees of separation in terms of hyperlinks? Next post messes about with that, but I still don’t know.
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I’m a little on the fence here — on one way, it’s cool I can stay and hang out with you, Terry, at your site with links you feed me for breakfast (over coffee). On the other hand, it defeats the purpose of associative thinking that underlies the power of linking. When I got there (wherever there is), I might find something different, but related, to follow and learn from. Intriguing that I have this conflicted response (sipping coffee in silence now)
Kevin
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We don’t really consider the humble hyperlink beyond its raw function, but I suspect there is much richness and connection that is undiscovered–hyperlink as undiscovered country.
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What you’ve described is something I describe with this presentation. https://www.scribd.com/document/69918102/Tutor-Mentor-Institute-Learning-Network-Strategy
The information I started putting on the internet in 1998 is organized in ways that people might find what they are looking for, at least on the first level, which is going to someone else’s web site. Once they get to those sites, digging through their links is a bit more challenging. I created this map around 2006-7 to show the sections of my library. http://tinyurl.com/TMI-libraryFull
I attended an open house at the University of Chicago last night, and met a woman working with a Johns Hopkins University program called Knowledge4Health. As we talked, I shared how you and others in the CLMOOC were using your own blogs to share work I’ve been doing. I visited her site this morning and on this page is a graphic similar to my concept map, and a video that describes how they share knowledge. https://www.k4health.org/topics/knowledge-management
As I watched it I said “that’s what I’ve been trying to do”. It’s also what you’re all doing via the MOOCs and your blogs.
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Daniel, sorry it took so long to approve this comment. Don’t know why it wasn’t automatic. They usually are. WordPress sighing.