Navigating Terra Incognita

In Linked, Barabasi describes how the Web is fragmented into four major continents due to the directedness of the links. Amidst this fragmentation, there is “terra incognita” (p.162), areas of the Web that remain undiscovered by search engines and are unreachable by surfing. He explains that Web is full of “disjointed directed paths” (p.167) that dictate the Web’s navigability.

Following Barabasi’s reasoning,, the strength of a webpage’s presence and accessibility is almost exclusively dictated by the number of links attached to it. I’m still unclear, however, about how important it is for these links to be relevant to the website’s objectives or target community. Is there really value in establishing links between sources that are inherently unrelated? For example, if I get 20 opera singers and 50 ice-cream truck drivers to link their personal websites to the blog developed by West Siders for Responsible Development, will that really help the organization in any way? Will this linking alone rescue them from the “terra incognita” that Barabasi describes?

The answers to these questions will help me plan my next course of action with my issue entrepreneurship project. I have gotten very few responses from organizations whose interests I thought were very similar to those of West Siders for Responsible Development. Is it better to keep pursuing those organizations or to broaden my efforts to organizations and individuals whose interests seem only marginally aligned?

I’ve gotten some solid feedback on the wiki I’ve been setting up for West Siders for Responsible Development. It’s not the hippest thing in the world, but it seems like it will serve its purpose until they decide how much money (if any) they can invest in a flashier resource. Once they approve of the content, I’m going to share it with a few other organizations I’ve been hearing about (mostly from Jonah—thank you!!!) I briefly met a couple of board members last week. It’s nice to be able to attach at least a couple of names with faces. I’m planning to meet with Toni, my primary contact, sometime this week. She seems uncomfortable interacting online, which is probably a main reason why they’ve relied mostly on regular mail to communicate with their members.

Toni is excited about the wiki in that it will allow other members to contribute to information upkeep. However, she worries that the fact that it’s open source will make more work for her by creating content management demands that haven’t exist before. How worried do you think she should be about people posting inappropriate/inaccurate information? Also, how vulnerable is a wiki to spam and things like that?

Citing Barabasi’s Linked, Molly and Stephen recently blogged about the vulnerability of networks that depend on one person. It seems that West Siders is in a position of this kind—without the continued devotion of a few core members, the network would likely fall apart. As Stephen touched on, a network can become stronger when it allows people to explore their passions, beliefs, perspectives, and aspirations. I hope that, by increasing the online presence of West Siders, the network will be strengthened through the recruitment of more people who care about the issues and principles embraced by the organization. This resource will also hopefully result in increased interaction among members and, in this way, enhance feelings of community and cohesion within the network.

In Where the Action is, Dourish describes Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world.” He writes, “…as we act through technology that has become ready-to-hand, the technology itself disappears from our immediate concerns. We are caught up in the performance of the work; our mode of being is one of ‘absorbed coping.’ The equipment fades into the background.” When working with social software, it seems that the magic happens only once you’ve reached this stage—finally, you stop noticing the mediated nature of the communication and you can actually get something done. It’s a struggle to achieve this level of comfort, and it requires motivation, trust, and courage to so drastically change the forms of interaction you’ve always used. I hope that my efforts with West Siders for Responsible Development will jumpstart their journey to this point. Once this happens, I think they would notice an increase in productivity, organization, and a strengthening of their network.