David Easley and Jon Kleinberg’s chapter on graphs provides an instructional background on the mechanics of visual aids. Their explanations on distances between nodes, paths, and connectivity, however, read as overly specific. Developing “basic network properties in a unifying language” (23) for graphs sounds unnecessary to a common reader because the very point of graphs is to make information accessible without the need for complicated directions. Visuals are so prevalent in our daily life that directions are unnecessary. Even seemingly private information made available to us with visual aids, like our Facebook data, is immediately digestible. Reconsidering how graphs are established, however, allows us to find similarities between visual aids that may be unexpected.
Through their discussion on social media, Easley and Kleinberg hinge upon a link between visual maps and connections with friends online. They introduce a concept named the “small-world phenomenon— the idea that the world looks “small” when you think of how short a path of friends it takes to get from you to almost anyone else” (35). The Guardian’s article on internet privacy opened our eyes to how closely linked humans are- even people who don’t know each other. I would argue that other graphs also work to shrink distant locations, and apply the idea of social network analysis to physical geography. Easley and Kleinberg use airline routes and subway maps to illustrate the graph’s ability to document “direct connections.” Shrinking one-hundred city blocks into twenty orderly dots makes an urban environment look compact. I can travel across an entire city by making a few stops along this lined? A flight from Atlanta to Tokyo, a fifteen hour flight across an entire ocean and continent, can be reduced to a two-page spread in a magazine. That journey looks pretty simple. As previously mentioned, graphs are incredibly accessible and benefit from not needing the mechanical directions provided by Easley and Kleinberg in their chapter. One thing graphs lack, however, is a sense of context. While they may be easy to read, their simplicity may imprint “the small-world phenomenon” on geography as well as people. Accessibility comes with a cost; whether or not such a cost is positive or negative is up for debate.
