Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition) |  | Author: Duncan J. Watts
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
List Price: $17.95
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Seller: firebell16
Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 36405
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0393325423
Dewey Decimal Number: 511.5
EAN: 9780393325423
ASIN: 0393325423
Publication Date: February 17, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
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: "Conversations concerning politics displayed a consistent pattern .... On election day, the strongest predictor of electoral success was not which party an individual privately supported but which party he or she expected would win." Six Degrees attempts to help readers understand the new and exciting field of networks and complexity. While considerably more demanding than a general book like The Tipping Point, it offers readers a snapshot of a riveting moment in science, when understanding things like disease epidemics and the stock market seems almost within our reach. --Therese Littleton
Product Description
The pioneering young scientist whose work on the structure of small worlds has triggered an avalanche of interest in networks. In this remarkable book, Duncan Watts, one of the principal architects of network theory, sets out to explain the innovative research that he and other scientists are spearheading to create a blueprint of our connected planet. Whether they bind computers, economies, or terrorist organizations, networks are everywhere in the real world, yet only recently have scientists attempted to explain their mysterious workings.
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 an array of disciplines to tell the story of an explosive new field of knowledge, the people who are building it, and his own peculiar path in forging this new science. .
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 36
 Good Read July 12, 2009
Julian Stahl (DeWitt, IA)
I just finished this book, and feel as though I learned a great deal from it. I knew networks were complex but I never looked at them the way Duncan did. He is a very intelligent man and It was great of him to write a book explaining his research. I would recommend it to anyone who has an open mind and likes to learn about the world we live in.
 Should be the "End of the Beginning" of your reading on this subject... March 10, 2009
Ashish Kumar (Singapore)
...if you plan to work in it. There are other books (e.g. Knoke and Yang's short introduction) which might serve as a better first book, and still others which could be better textbooks (e.g. Wasserman and Faust- I haven't yet read it) or guide books (e.g. "Exploratory SNA with Pajek" by De Nooy et al which I have started to use). Watts' book stands out because it is a non- academic text by an academic who has played a role in the development of the subject. There are some generalizations about what physicists, economists etc are like which I found a bit irritating. But overall the author has put in a lot of personal perspectives and I suppose those generalizations are part of a package. On the whole the writing is accessible and engaging. This book does give you the big picture about SNA and how it developed as an inter- disciplinary field.
 I got the wrong book January 21, 2009
Janet Drake (San Diego, CA)
0 out of 14 found this review helpful
It's totally my fault, but I was looking for books on environmental changes and got this book in error. Janet
awesome read October 20, 2008
dnparadice (Colorado)
This book describes networks and every thing about them. Duncan watts makes the subject accessible to everyone. I enjoyed it greatly.
The end of the beginning of a new science October 17, 2008
Caterina Desiato (Honolulu, HI, USA)
"Six Degrees" is, above all, a story, told from the perspective of one of its personages: the story of the "newborn" science of networks. The narration counterpoints the development of the author's arguments, which are served in an appealing dish flavored with entertaining views on the backstage of academic research.
The author's "Odyssey" departs from his Ithaca, the actual town where Watts was studying crickets' synchronization, at Cornell University. While trying to understand the phenomenon, he applied the concept of network and unexpectedly, a new, vastly uncovered research field opened in front of him.
Key concepts as "emergence" and "networks" are introduced in the first chapter, followed by a passionate perspective on the precursors of the new science, from mathematical graphs to sociological structuralism and phenomena emerging in quantum physics (Chapter 2.)
Watts outlines the new insights that an interdisciplinary perspective can offers on different issues - from cultural fads to financial crises, from biological epidemics to technological systems breakdowns or organizations robustness and vulnerability - in terms of patterns of interaction between the elements of the networks of complex systems (Chapters 6-9.)
The first question that Watts tried to answer in this perspective is the Small-World Problem (Milgram, 1967.) An experiment, conducted by Milgram in the 60s, showed that the average path length (the hops between two elements in a network) in the USA social network is six: there are just six degrees of separation between anybody and anybody else. In absence of further data and power of calculation, the small-world problem remained a paradox for thirty years.
Watts and Strogatz created a network model balancing order and chaos to understand the dynamics underneath small-world networks, commencing a prolific academic debate on real-world networks (Chapters 3-5.)
Ink flowed since the first paper Watts and Strogatz wrote about it in 1998. They realized that different dynamics of very heterogeneous contexts (actors, micro-organism and power grid) could be interpreted as "small-world networks," where ordered links forming organized clusters alternates a few long distances shortcut links (in social networks, they are created by people affiliation to multiple different networks.)
As counterintuitive as it can be from a personal local perspective, the result is that, at a global level, each human being on the globe is actually connected with any other within a few hops. This is the main thought that Watts offers us to take the measure of the new findings that the science of networks could offer to an increasingly connected world.
Easily readable and stimulating, Watts' work might deceive just in a few passages that sound almost obsolete in the intellectual framework he's depicting as an epochal shift. People's interactions are "more real" then physic particles or galaxies; a "taxonomy" of networks is needed; social sciences and biology can bring some knowledge on the "essence" of the real phenomena in order to understand which network is more "useful"...
Useful to who, at which level? Are we broadening our awareness of phenomena interdependence just to be able to design, for instance, a better strategy for the enhancement of a firm efficiency? Well, probably that too, and future researches could focus both on the emergence of local phenomena as well as on their interconnections at multiple levels. As Watts writes toward the conclusion of his story, it's "the end of the beginning" of a new science: stay tuned.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 36
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