Duncan Watts and Sergei Eisenstein

In Six Degrees, Duncan Watts demonstrates the implausibility of Stanley Milgram’s experiment, designed to explain the structure of networks in human interaction and communication. Visually painting a map of the social connections (friendships) between a multitude of humans, would entail a sketch of a particular network. Due to the likelihood of two friends of a particular human, to be friends of each other themselves, the human communication network appears more like a cluster than a web. This cluster resembles most of the online network we experience through web 2.0 as many elements of our online world are interrelated in various ways. It is important to remember, as mentioned by Watts, that the assembly of such elements, results in something completely different from the collection of disassociated components. This reminds me of Eisenstein’s notions of soviet montage, where he demonstrates that by juxtaposing two completely different images with each other, a new meaning is formed, completely different from either of the stand alone components. In regards to a network cluster, I suppose the juxtaposition could occur between programs that function cooperatively, such as Facebook and Spotify. By creating a juxtaposition between Facebook and Spotify through posting users’ activity on Spotify through to Facebook (available for all friends to see), a new meaning is given to how that Facebook user associates with the particular music and therefore associated themselves with the social connotations that the genre of music entails.

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