Linked Analysis

Linked and its Personal Effect on Me

Throughout my reading of Linked by Albert-Lazzlo Barabasi, the paperback assigned to my book club group, I came to many realizations concerning myself and the business world. The book is all about networks in our current and past environments. The complexity of these networks described in Linked expanded my knowledge of the ways that the world which seems to be randomly connected really associates with itself. All things that associate with one another in this world do so in a manner that is ordered. From the huge and ever growing World Wide Web to the critical p53 protein found in many living things, networks of the same structure are found within extremely different systems. Insightful information alike to this led me to consider how Linked affected my personal views and opinions, reflect upon some significant ideas I had after reading it, and identify a couple goals I intend to pursue as a result of reading the book.

Barabasi makes many convincing arguments in regards to how networks are present in our everyday lives and how they were existent beforehand, through the internalization of these arguments, I found that some of my views concerning the networks were changed. Before I read Linked, my assumption was that the connection of different things in the world was generally randomly orchestrated and fairly uniform. This assumption was completely disproved before I reached the 50th page. Barabasi exemplifies the network I described as being like a highway system, all the major cities have nearly the same amount of highways running through them so all the nodes generally have the same amount of links. The airport system is far different. Although there are many airports throughout the United States, only a small number enjoy a large amount of traffic. Airports such as JFK act as hubs, which are nodes with a large amount of links in comparison to other nodes, because it receives and sends off a large amount of airplanes....