The Majority Illusion in Social Networks

Social behaviors are often contagious, spreading through a population as individuals imitate the decisions and choices of others. A variety of global phenomena, from innovation adoption to the emergence of social norms and political movements, arise as a result of people following a simple local rule, such as copy what others are doing. However, individuals often lack global knowledge of the behaviors of others and must estimate them from the observations of their friends' behaviors. In some ...

 Paradigm Shift: Everyone Will have a Timeline

In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything we’ve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And we’ll look back at the time before our feed started — before Year Zero — as a huge, unknowable black hole. This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quic...

 Overview of Optical Networks

Optical fibers can transmit digitized light signals over long distances because of the purity of glass fiber combined with improved electronics technology. With some acceptable transmission loss, low interference, and high-bandwidth potential, an optical fiber is almost an ideal transmission medium. Optical communication systems may sometimes be combined with electrical components. In such systems, electrical data bits are converted into light, using a certain wavelength; when the transmissio...

 The Internet Fosters Collectivism

The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web’s early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. [...] he way we got here is that one subculture of technologists has recently become more influential than the others. The winning subculture doesn’t have a formal name, but I’ve sometimes ca...