The environment is a physical and malleable region in our
perception, but other forms of environment seem to exist such as the network.
The Internet has become more than just tool for our daily lives, it’s become
part of us. Just like the environment, the connections in the network has made
an ecosystem that influencing one small point can significantly effect many
other points. Although the government runs the network, the protocols did
remind me of the amendments such as freedom of speech. The environment and our
genes shape who we are, but the environment does have significant influence in
our genes as well. Seeing the network as an environment, although virtual,
might make us prone to see the network more than just symbols and numbers, and
might evolve us to have a new manner of thinking. Once we have it, we cant live
without it. Its part of who we are as a society and perhaps mutating within our
genes as an evolutionary processes.
This
influence may come at a cost of our own abilities, in other words, a trade-off
of something we hold dear. We are social animals, but the network is making us
further apart from each other using Facebook, twitter, and even mobile phones.
The lack of human contact, face to face, can cause us to loose the ability to
interact with deeper meaning such as facial expressions and touch. Just like in
the article, students who did research through the Internet might get things
done, but wont understand it in depth because they weren’t “taught” enough with
human interaction. With this lack of human contact, this new form of
environment will perhaps let us loose trust within each other and also
ourselves.
Syed, you touch on so many different types of networks in this post: biological ones, computational or technical ones, and social ones. We might have a useful debate over your point that effects on one node in a network can have large ramifications for other parts of the network, as in a species food web. This does seem to be true of examples in ecology, but compare this to Baran's proposal for distributed networks and packet switching, where minimal levels of redundancy allow for "survivability" of network communication and information. It's useful to see that network design, as well as rhetoric, can serve both ends (it's all holistically connected, and sensitive to minute changes anywhere in the system vs. it's all connected somewhat haphazardly, and robust/flexible enough to withstand local attack or alteration or tampering).
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