Ultralight For Sale

Our society is in many ways organized as Networks, according to the sociologist Barry Wellman, we find community in network and not groups, groups are a kind of network, being densely knit. We have become portals where we maintain community ties through updating our Facebook status or commenting on others pictures in addition to call, write letters and have a pint together. The Internet is greatly used to create new or manage already existing personal networks.

The value of network is most famously addressed by Metcalfe (the Intventor of Ethernet) and later by Reed. Metcalfe's model change the model used by Sarnoff where each recipient contributed with a same determined value, and changed this into a model a model taking into consideration that networks are also making more values by creating more connections. This could be understood by the way Internet technology creates other ways between the nodes in a network, as the number of potential connections between nodes grow more quickly than the number of nodes. (Sarnoff's model is from the early age of broadcast mass media, where each radio receiver had two naïve ears). The third model is the one of Reed (Group Forming Network -GFN) that asserts that the utility of large networks can scale exponentially with the size of the Network.

More about this could be found here or in the book Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold