Group Three.

I was a little girl the first time my grandfather told me, "In life, its 10% what you know, 90% who you know." This was easy for me to accept, because I lived in the same small town where my parents had grown up and gone to school together (along with each of their five siblings, and well over 50 first cousins- apiece). They grew up in the same town where my grandfathers were born, and were raised, quite literally down the street from each other. The result? I am related to an unusual amount of people, all within the same 20 mile radius. I was always aware that when I went out in public, there were always relatives I wouldn't recognize, or friends of relatives who would know me. In class the other day, Professor Hayden asked if we act differently when we think people are watching us. The answer is ABSOLUTELY. When I was in middle school, I went to a coffee shop one day after school without asking my parents. My cousin, who owns a garage down the street from the coffee shop called my mom from work to tell her how exciting it was that I was finally allowed to go places with my friends. Yes, it was exciting, the next time I got to do that. Three years later. I was forced to resign myself to the fact that I simply couldn't guarantee that I wouldn't be recognized while out doing something my friends could get away with. Some of my friends could buy alcohol in high school. Not me. My parents had spied everywhere. Eventually, my friends caught onto this and stopped inviting me to partake in their "extracurricular activities." It was tragic.

The point is, for better or worse, networks are all around us. What seemed to me to be an impenetrable web that I never seemed to be able to escape as a high school student now feels like a reassuring safety net, and I have become a part of it. It no longer is as important what the relationships between the people in this town are, but rather what they have turned them into. It is a network of families and friends and some people that nobody likes but we can't seem to get rid of (don't judge me, you know you know somebody like this). My mother's family network may have just as many people as my father's family network, but the way they interact and build contacts makes them look like very different structures indeed. It is indeed not what is within the nodes that shapes the network, but the nature of the association between. What I considered a curse (and sometimes still do) as a child now seems to be a dream come true. Its like the saying, "there's an app for that!" I have a family member or friend for almost all situations in most places.

Networks come in all shapes and sizes. Everything belongs to one, and they can vary from kindergarten students on the playground to multinational corporations. With this degree of variety, I felt a little last week as though it was too broad of a concept for me to get my head around it. I realize though that the key is to keep everything in perspective, and when I feel myself starting to get overwhelmed with all the talk of the ANTS and the  network societies, that it all boils back down to that most basic of structures that exists between people. Nodes and links. People, or groups of people, and the ways in which they associate and interact. That's not so scary.

Speaking of scary.... Happy Halloween everyone!!