Disconnect the Dots (429 hits)
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Submitted by Stin (View user info) at 2005-08-01 17:53:18 EDT
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"Human networks are distinct from electronic ones. They are not the Internet. They are political and emotional connections among people who must trust one another in order to function, like Colombian drug cartels and Basque separatists and the Irish Republican Army. Not to mention high-seas pirates, smugglers of illegal immigrants, and rogue brokers of weapons of mass destruction."
- Joel Garreau, Washington Post
--
When I was in high school, I didn't realise that you could analyse those who were supposed to be your friends in terms of their importance to a group. Sure, I realised that not all animals are created equal, but I never knew it was possible to put a number on popularity and usefulness; or that they were not necessarily one and the same.
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"A very centralized network is dominated by one or a few very central nodes. If these nodes are removed or damaged, the network quickly fragments into unconnected sub-networks. A highly central node can become a single point of failure. A network centralized around a well connected hub can fail abruptly if that hub is disabled or removed. Hubs are nodes with high degree and betweeness centrality.
A less centralized network has no single points of failure. It is resilient in the face of many intentional attacks or random failures - many nodes or links can fail while allowing the remaining nodes to still reach each other over other network paths. Networks of low centralization fail gracefully."
--
Back then, I tended to think of the Clique as the former kind of network. I assumed that without Anna, the whole thing would fall apart. After all, she always seemed from the outside to be the leader. Anna with the long legs and blue eyes, Anna with the hottest boyfriend, Anna with her friends clustered around her. Anna, who made my life hell for being that shy guy with freckles who dared to ask her out on a date.
Of course I should have realised at the time that she and the Clique would go on to far bigger and better things than Sunnydale High School had to offer them. Marriage to an up-and-coming politician here, a signing to the New England Patriots there, climbing the corporate ladder at a rate even the Wall Street Journal couldn't fail to miss, a prime-time spot on a national television show, the most promising young research scientist... Oh yes, they had it all. The fame, the fortunes and all the glamour that Daddy's money could buy. What was I doing whilst they achieved those lofty heights? Writing economics articles for the New York Times. The perfect job to foster connections.
My place in the Clique had always been an outside one, a glitch on the surface of an otherwise smooth sphere. I never quite fit with their shiny perfection, but I guess I had a use to them. Well, I know I had a use to them. They might not have wanted my company, but they sure wanted the high GPA's I could ensure them. So I was tolerated, if not liked, and somehow we made it through to the end of high school.
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"Social network researchers measure network activity for a node by using the concept of degrees - the number of direct connections a node has. In our kite network, D has the most direct connections in the network, making hers the most active node in the network. She is a 'connector' or 'hub' in this network. Common wisdom in personal networks is "the more connections, the better." This is not always so. What really matters is where those connections lead to - and how they connect the otherwise unconnected! Here D has connections only to others in her immediate cluster - her clique. She connects only those who are already connected to each other. "
--
The Clique were useful to me in my earlier years. They gave me a leg-up and the status I needed to get to where I wanted to be, but they'd out-lived their use to me now. All they represented were the years of fake smiles and hidden anguish. I couldn't sit back and watch them take the things in life that I'd helped them get without so much as a thank you.
Before I learned about network analysis I assumed that if I were to displace the central hub, the whole problem would be sorted, right? How silly and naive I was to believe that things could be that simple.
It was easy to remove Anna from the group. Even friends who have been so for a long time tend to be somewhat unforgiving when you sell their most private and intimate secrets to the tabloid press. All it took was a phone call to an old friend from college, and with a few drinks she was spilling everything. Well, that and a paparazzo snapped her fellating a rising star in the art world, who just so happened to be dating Louisa at the time. Her husband wasn't too impressed, since it cost him his seat for the upcoming election.
Unable to face the ire of those around her, Anna cut her hair, cut her losses and emigrated to St Lucia.
--
"F and G have fewer connections than D, yet the pattern of their direct and indirect ties allow them to access all the nodes in the network more quickly than anyone else. They have the shortest paths to all others -- they are close to everyone else. They are in an excellent position to monitor the information flow in the network -- they have the best visibility into what is happening in the network. "
--
The network continued to thrive. I'd underestimated the power of what I had thought were purely superficial bonds. Even with Anna gone, the Clique continued to meet, make headlines and increase their social standing. Even though my name was automatically high-profile through this attachment, I couldn't allow them to continue to get what they didn't deserve.
--
At school, Louisa was always the one with the most information in the Clique. You could guarantee that if there was a rumour going around she'd know about it, and she didn't miss anything that happened. I hated her almost as much as I loathed Anna, because she wouldn't let me forget. Every time I saw her, I saw the mocking in her eyes. Out in the real world, nothing had changed. She still saw me as the loser who had dared to dream above his station, even though I was now powerful in my own right.
Not only was Louisa a mine of information, she was the only one of the gang who had any intelligence. She had always shown a flair for organic chemistry, and had recently been selected to head a team of the most brilliant young academics researching a drug to prevent cocaine crossing the placenta to an unborn child. It was unfortunate that nobody knew about her recreational habit, and a tragic loss to the scientific community when she was found dead in her laboratory one morning. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death and much ado was made about more thorough background checking.
It's a shame when your coke is cut with anthrax.
--
"Nodes that connect their group to others usually end up with high network metrics. Boundary spanners such as F, G, and H are more central than their immediate neighbors whose connections are only local, within their immediate cluster. Boundary spanners are well-positioned to be innovators, since they have access to ideas and information flowing in other clusters. They are in a position to combine different ideas and knowledge, found in various places, into new products and services."
--
Joe had been something of a floater in the Clique, maintaining his position by virtue of his potential to be a star. Anna had liked stars in the ascent around her; their glow made her shine all the brighter. Joe did stand-up comedy at several local clubs in high school, and had been picked up by Saturday Night Live when he was at Yale. He had immediately stopped majoring in History of Art and had gone on to pursue much greater things.
One night after the show had finished, he went for a drink in a downtown bar with a couple of his colleagues. It was a real shame that the pretty young Thai girl he'd taken home was only 15, and very unfortunate that her lesbian partner was an undercover police officer. Someone must have tipped them off about his penchant for underage sexual partners, because they also raided his computer. Such a fall from grace must be hard to take; the last I heard was that he was serving an 8-10 stretch for paedophilia and statutory rape.
--
The Clique was falling apart. Little by little, just as it should. How could it not, when its high-flying members were slowly being exposed as the flawed humans that they were. A model of perfection is precisely that - a model. A strong network can stand up to many intentional attacks, but even the mighty must eventually fall.
--
Jeff was a big, dumb jock. I don't say it to be insulting, merely as a statement of fact. Had someone else not been doing his classwork for him, he'd have been lucky to scrape a 1.0 on graduation. Luckily for him Harvard wasn't interested in his academic record, but his prowess as a wide receiver. On the playing field he didn't look like anybody's fool.
After barely passing his Liberal Arts degree, Jeff was picked up by the Patriots. He started every game in his first season, and had been singled out by all the major sports channels as someone likely to go a long, long way. Companies wanted Jeff Tucker to endorse their latest product; from boots to juice to hair care and beyond. It seemed that nothing was beyond the reach of this handsome football star.
Unfortunately, I never got the chance to implement the plan I had to take Jeff down. After a particularly hard tackle in a game with the Steelers, Jeff was subjected to a random drugs test. Turned out he'd been pumping anabolic steroids to build that muscle tone and keep his place in the starting lineup.
--
"Most people would view the nodes on the periphery of a network as not being very important. In fact, I and J receive very low centrality scores for this network. Yet, peripheral nodes are often connected to networks that are not currently mapped. I and J may be contractors or vendors that have their own network outside of the company -- making them very important resources for fresh information not available inside the company! "
--
Bit-part players, you might call them. Gina, who had inherited a large sum when she turned 21, had never bothered to complete school. She'd married Randy, her high school sweetheart, and lived on her Aunt Hortense's money and the not insubstantial salary her husband made. He'd started off on the trading floor, but had quickly moved up into middle management and then to a global directorship where he spent his days analysing the fluctuations of government bonds. It was harder to break them - Randy had a good reputation, no reports of insider trading, and Gina was just, well, bland.
Randy's downfall was his golf buddy, Jim. He introduced Jim to the Clique shortly after Louisa's death, hoping that Jim's sister Felicity would be a suitable partner for me. What Jim hadn't told Randy was that he himself had a nasty criminal record which involved several covered-up occurrences of assault against gays and blacks.
Naturally, all it took was a newspaper article insinuating that Randy had withdrawn support for certain country's bonds because of his association with a man known to be a racist to cause an immediate suspension pending investigation. A broken man, Randy resigned his job and was committed to a psychiatric unit shortly afterwards suffering from severe depression and panic attacks.
Gina, Gina, Gina. So pretty, so well-maintained. So damn boring. The few dates I took her on (to console her after Randy's breakdown, you understand) were perhaps the most excruciatingly painful hours of my life. But they - and the weekend in a villa in Florida - were enough to reassure her that our old "friendship" had not died, and when I recommended that she invest her millions in a particularly volatile company she agreed without question. After all, who else would know but an economics reporter?
It was a risk; there had to be risk or she would have known straight up that I was killing her. My risk was the stock rising indeterminably, and the final nail in the Clique's coffin never being cast. Her risk was the stock dropping, and losing everything. I had a feeling that if I were patient my seemingly favourite horse would collapse just short of the winning post.
It went better than I ever could have imagined. The first six months the stock rose; not by a lot, but enough to almost double the amount she'd invested. Silly girl didn't want to pull out then though, just as I'd banked she wouldn't. Greed is a powerful thing, and Gina was desperate to make up for Randy's lost income. Even when the stock began to drop, she still wanted to hold out. When the company (some dot com selling bluechip technology) went into liquidation and the share price plummeted, she couldn't sell. Nobody wanted 500,000 shares in a company that had been declared bankrupt. It turned out that the CEO had been embezzling for quite some years, and he'd finally milked the cash cow dry.
Robbed of her assets Gina could no longer afford the lifestyle she'd enjoyed, and the financial newspapers ran twelve column inches on the downfall of the Greenes.
--
"There is always a delicate balance between usefulness/value and risk. Social networks thrive on the usefulness factor, but they often fail to mention the risk. "
- http://more.theory.org/archives/000110.html
--
The Clique lived for the usefulness of each to each other. They took the risk of trusting someone without really knowing them, and that's how I broke them. Anna, Joe, Louisa, Jeff, Randy and Gina. The coolest of the cool, reduced to nothing but empty shells. Like grains of sand on the beach, there will be another Clique. I don't doubt that there is one out there right now. I just hope that the person who sits on the outside will disconnect the dots like I did, and exact their revenge.
Me? I'm sitting here in my office, copy filed for the day, drinking a coffee and looking out over Times Square. Life couldn't be better.
--
(all unreferenced quotes modified from http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html)
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