RSA Animate - The Power of Networks

In this new RSA Animate, Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, explores the power of network visualisation to help navigate our complex modern world. Taken from a lecture given by Manuel Lima as part of the RSA's free public events programme. Listen to the full talk: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/the-power-of-networks...

I like the idea of three ways of organizing categories of knowledge:

• Problems of Simplicity
• Problems of Disorganized Complexity
• Problems of Organized Complexity

I suspect that the intelligence amplification available via the computer and the Internet allows us to create systems of knowledge like Wikipedia, which uses hyperlinks to make interconnections among huge numbers of pieces of knowledge. I suspect that in some sense that capability was always resident in our brains.

Newton invented calculus as a help in creating simple models to replace massive amounts of data, and the tool served admirably for a variety of purposes ranging from the solar system to trajectories of artillery, and I am sure the tool is still used today. We see Newton as bringing physics to preeminence among the sciences, and the physicists of the early 20th century as they developed relativity and quantum theory as continuing that preeminence. Still, systematic biologists continued their fundamental work in the discovery of new species and the illumination of inheritance among species.

Fortunately, we continue to use all three kinds of models for different purposes.

• We continue to map our family trees and systematic biologists continue to trace the genetic linkages among species using tree models.
• We (or the scientists among us) continue to use the insights of quantum theory to consider a world  described by random events and limits to knowledge, as social scientists continue to use statistical analysis of real world data to create models of partial causality.
• We use network models not only for Wikipedia and the human brain, but for many fields.