If you read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and found yourself wanting to read a meatier and more science-based take on the same concept, Linked is probably the book you should read next.
This is a kind of primer to network theory that gets a bit more scientific than some other popular science books I could mention. The author, Albert-László Barabási, is a physics professor who introduced the concept of scale-free networks in 1999, and this book is centred around the work that his research team carried out in defining this idea.
Scale-free networks show a power law-based link distribution, which in plain English means that some nodes within the network have far more connections than the majority of others. For example, Twitter is a scale-free network – a few accounts have millions of followers while most accounts have less than 200. But this pattern of network structure isn’t just found in online social networks. It’s also observed in lots of other situations, ranging from national road maps to the network of nerves in the human body.
The interesting thing about this is that the scale-free network pattern, which is scientifically described, is followed by both human-made networks and in nature by biological networks. It’s encountered in so many different situations that its significance to the way life – and even matter in general – organises itself is pretty interesting. And I guess that’s the point of this book.
To go back to The Tipping Point, this is basically the science behind the sort of phenomenon Gladwell is describing when he talks about Connectors and Mavens and so on. Barabási strikes a good balance between detail and discussion, with not too much science to be overwhelming, but enough for the book to seem refreshingly unpatronising. And he’s not a snob – in fact he even quotes from Gladwell, finding his ideas interesting and keen to explore where they intersect with his own more mathematical work.
For me, Linked formed part of a loosely connected trilogy along with The Tipping Point and Emergence by Steven Johnson, each of which deal with underlying complex dynamics that affect societies, economies, cultures, technology and even nature itself. But if I was only allowed to keep one of them, it would be Linked.
