{"id":562,"date":"2015-03-09T13:31:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T17:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/?p=562"},"modified":"2015-03-09T13:31:54","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T17:31:54","slug":"expanding-the-small-world-phenomenon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/2015\/03\/09\/expanding-the-small-world-phenomenon\/","title":{"rendered":"Expanding the &#8220;Small World Phenomenon&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>David Easley and Jon Kleinberg\u2019s 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 \u201cbasic network properties in a unifying language\u201d (23) \u00a0for 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201csmall-world phenomenon\u2014 the idea that the world looks \u201csmall\u201d when you think of how short a path of friends it takes to get from you to almost anyone else\u201d (35). <i>The Guardian<\/i>\u2019s article on internet privacy opened our eyes to how closely linked humans are- even people who don\u2019t 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\u2019s ability to document \u201cdirect connections.\u201d 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 \u201cthe small-world phenomenon\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/files\/2015\/03\/Screen-Shot-2015-03-09-at-1.30.01-PM.png\" rel=\"lightbox[562]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-563\" src=\"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/files\/2015\/03\/Screen-Shot-2015-03-09-at-1.30.01-PM.png\" alt=\"Vancouver and Amsterdam are only a magazine page away\" width=\"597\" height=\"281\" srcset=\"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/files\/2015\/03\/Screen-Shot-2015-03-09-at-1.30.01-PM.png 597w, https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/files\/2015\/03\/Screen-Shot-2015-03-09-at-1.30.01-PM-300x141.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 597px) 100vw, 597px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Easley and Jon Kleinberg\u2019s 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 \u201cbasic network properties in a unifying language\u201d (23) \u00a0for graphs sounds unnecessary to a common reader because the very point of graphs &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/2015\/03\/09\/expanding-the-small-world-phenomenon\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Expanding the &#8220;Small World Phenomenon&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-1","category-readers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":564,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions\/564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}