Technology, history, and social impacts of technology are most often framed in terms of hardware, software, and finance, but communication technologies have the potential to change the way people think, communicate, and organize social groups. These impacts are sometimes framed by Moore's law (microprocessors and chips grow more powerful and less expensive over time), Metcalfe's law (the value of a technical network grows as the square of the number of nodes grows) and Reed's Law (when technical networks enable people to form social groups, the value of the network grows as two raised to the power of the number of nodes - much faster than just the rate of growth of technical networks). The group-formation enabled by the Internet makes it possible for people who don't know each other and who are located in different parts of the world to connect with each other in regard to shared interests - economic, social, cultural, and political. When communication technology enables people to organize collective action in these spheres, civilizations change. Now that the power of computing and communication has untethered from the desktop and leaped into billions of pockets, the forms of collective action are erupting in places and spheres of life where computation and communication had never reached before.

At the point where billions of people have access to personal communications and the instant information that the Internet provides, the aspects of cooperation and collective action discussed by Axelrod, Ostrom, and others comes into play - the capabilities of the emerging mobile mediasphere enable forms of collective action that were not possible before.

Moore's law means that the quantitative capabilities of chip-based devices grow so quickly that they translate into qualitative changes over periods of decades; today, billions of people carry devices that are thousands of times more powerful than the first personal computers, and cost a fraction of the price. At the same time, the users of these devices discover and exploit communication capabilities, social potential, political leverage, economic opportunities that were not dreamed of by those who designed, manufactured and sold the technologies. The technologies that make smart mobs possible are in the earliest stages of development, similar to the state of the personal computer in 1980 and the Internet in 1990. Yet the political demonstrations and electoral leverage that manifested in the Philippines, Korea, Spain, the USA and elsewhere - deposing governments and electing others - show the potentially disruptive power of smart mobs, even in their earliest stages.

At the same time, primitive ad-hoc computation collectives such as SETI@home and folding@home indicate new forms of computing emerging from the collective, voluntary efforts of millions of computer users. And GPS chips add the power of location-based services to the mix: people are mobilizing social networks and information in the immediate time and space.

Economically, the ability to gain profit by sharing with others, rather than only by competing - as manifested by Amazon, Google, eBay, open source software and other enterprises - is making a new kind of economic enterprise possible. Commerce is ancient, markets are as old as the crossroads, but capitalism is only about 500 years old, enabled by technologies such as joint stock ownership companies, shared liability insurance organizations, double entry bookkeeping. Now, the peer production methods exhibited by open source communities and other enterprises hint that humans have not stopped inventing new forms of economic collective action.

Six Degrees begins in the beginning. Stanley Milgram's initial small world studies are analyzed. His findings in seeing if a group of people in Nebraska can get a letter to someone in Massachusetts are scrutinized. Milgram left a puzzle. Mathematically, six degrees of separation can be shown and intuitively it is appealing. But do social networks actually work that way?

Initially, Watts steps into the world of pure mathematic theory. Graph theory and random graphs are employed to build potential worlds in which connections can be made. These tools are detailed and their histories explained.

Watts and his colleagues then take the science to new levels, by introducing sociology, epidemiology, economics, and business models into this new multi-disciplinary science. Immediately, each new field of study brings with it new insights into network dynamics.

This convergence of disciplines reveals the social, transportation and technological networks that make up our world. These networks are, ultimately, made up of individuals. Individuals in turn relate back to the networks and define how they operate.

Socially, people relate to their network by clustering. Clusters are logical organizations of network elements. In a social context, we might cluster in terms of a religion, a favorite author, a school we are attending or an affinity for a type of food. Some of these have very close physical distance, while others have a social distance with members spread out over a large area.

Networks of this type are, to various extents, “scale-free” networks. If graphed these networks roughly follow a classic power law trend where the level of connectivity between two nodes in a network increases dramatically as more nodes are connected. Real-world scale-free networks tend to have highly connected hubs which rapidly, purposely, and efficiently transmit pertinent or pervasive content from one location to another. In social circles, these are networkers. In the airline network these are hub airports. In traffic they would be freeway interchanges.

Due to this architecture, the Internet and modern air transport have combined to greatly decrease the role of proximity in our social networks. This has had great impacts on commerce, tourism, cultural sensitivity and other social factors. However, it has also led to great risks in the transmission of diseases, sensitivity to distant economic fluctuations, and rapid spread of misinformation.

These dynamics create a type of network that Duncan calls simultaneously robust and vulnerable. Their strength and weakness is that, with rapid transmission from cluster to cluster, anything can move quickly from one location or group to another. He uses the example of Toyota, whose network of suppliers was organized in such a way as to quickly compensate for and recover from a potential economic catastrophe.

Stable scale-free networks do not rely on a rigid hierarchy to provide direction in times of crisis. Rather, the structure of the network itself can rapidly respond to an unforeseen situation.

Their network was arranged in such a way as to foster and reward communication. This communication helped cope with ambiguous or unplanned situations. Rather than paralyzing Toyota while people waited for a decision from a rigid hierarchy, the contractors in the network were able to analyze the calamity and provide a rapid response to it.

As mentioned above, this robustness also rapidly transmits malicious content as well. The Melissa Virus, SARS and Ebola are analyzed to show why the network did or did not transmit them and, when it did, how they eventually died out.

Watts ends this book by summarizing that the multidimensional nature of social distance is sometimes counterintuitive and subjective. People can feel close in a network sense to people they are physically distant from and, conversely, socially distant from people physically nearby.

He continues by warning that social and physical distances have shrunk. People can quickly travel from place to place and economies are highly interdependent. The sheer number of dependencies in the modern world may yield surprising results from seemingly insignificant actions.

He finishes by showing the stability of our networks with the example of how New York adapted to the 9-11 attacks. The City bounced back to semi-normal operations within a week. During the disaster, the best laid plans of emergency operations staff were scuttled by the utter unavailability of facilities and services designed to copy with disasters. The network will provide.

Analytical results from modeling the fitness consequences of two decision-making mechanisms, despotism and democracy, shows that generally despotic models leads to higher costs than democratic models because despotism produces more extreme decisions than democracy. "Even when the despot is the most experienced group member, it only pays other members to accept its decision when group size is small and the despot's average error is lower than the average median error of all other group members."

Research has largely assumed despotism because social structures among animals are commonly hierarchical and the ability to vote and to count votes is not obvious. However, there is mounting empirical evidence of voting in the animal world by body postures, ritualized movements, and vocalizations, as well as vote counting in the form of summing up votes, integration of votes up to an intensity threshold, and averaging of votes.

An important context in which social animals have to make group decisions is activity synchronization, e.g. red deer herds have to decide when to end rumination and move on. The model assumes that (1) synchronization costs increase linearly with the difference between when an individual would have preferred to stop and when the group actually stops, and (2) costs of stopping to early or too late are symmetrical. Even when relaxing assumption (1) costs are still higher for despotic than for demographic groups in most cases. When relaxing assumption (2) a democratic majority rule different from simple majority that reflects the asymmetry between "too early" and "too late" costs is least costly.

These results are fairly robust with respect to group heterogeneity, energy needed for enforcement, and individuals having incomplete information about their own optimal activity duration. The model predicts that democracy gives groups a competitive advantage and due to natural selection should be quite common in social groups of animals.

Currently, regulatory policy in the digitally networked environment is being used to replicate the current mass media structure in which individuals are passive consumers obtaining information and content from a few commercial producers. In this paper, Benkler provides legal, regulatory, and technological examples of how the mass media producer-consumer model is being reproduced at the content, logical, and physical layers of the digitally networked environment. At the content layer, intellectual property rights are used to legally deny uses that purely provide for public discourse. At the logical layer, owners of the logical layer are allowed to design that layer to protect the use of their content even for uses that are privileged by law. At the physical layer, the FCC has gone in two opposing directions by both created a commons of digital spectrum and perpetuated the current broadcast system with the allocation of digital spectrum. And in cable broadband, providers cite "technical reasons" for creating a system that provides significantly larger downstream capacity than upstream capacity and that technically prohibits customers from becoming users by hosting servers that serve up content in both cases perpetuating the mass media producer-consumer model.

But people want to be users as is evidenced by the Internet and the fact that people using telephones have spent more than on "newspapers, magazines, broadcast cable, and movies combined" in order to participate in communication. Users consume information but also rework information and send it to others (or produce new information). The Supreme Court's view of the First Amendment has repeatedly upheld the notion of users in that it provides for "robust debate, diversity of viewpoints, and individual expressive freedom" as opposed to the view that it provides a technical rule against regulation as regulation. At the same time, mass media has become technically, economically, and legally entrenched and government regulation seeks to counteract the potentially ill-effects on the intent of the First Amendment. The reality is that mass media provides very few individuals or organizations with access to communication pathways, and hence without regulation and maybe in spite of it, it is possible for this reality to inhibit the intent of the First Amendment.

Benkler calls for regulatory policy to move away from providing better service to consumers and towards enabling use and that consumption, production, and exchange of content is the purview of users - a move from the mass media producer-consumer model to an information commons. Today, technologically through the digitally networked environment and through appropriate regulatory policy, it is possible to develop a system in which individuals are free to participate in the consumption, production, and exchange of information - an information commons. Such a system would provide the intent of the First Amendment as regulatory policy today seeks to provide in spite of the realities of the mass media producer consumer model. However, such a system is not guaranteed and is not without regulation and therefore appropriate regulatory choices must be made at all levels (physical layer, logical layer, and content layer) to ensure a commons.

The competitive advantage that social networks create is called social capital. Empirical evidence shows that brokerage between interdependent groups that specialize on different things creates more social capital than simply a high number of relationships among individuals (i.e. network closure). However, brokers depend on trust, and trust is frequently viewed to require network closure. The problem with this view is that with increased network closure the value of brokers diminishes which in turn creates less social capital. Part of solving this problem is to figure out whether network closure really does produce the kind of trust that increases social capital. Burt shows that trust created by network closure might be ill-founded.

The relationship strength between ego and alter correlates with the amount of trust between ego and alter. In a social context ego also receives gossip about alter, i.e. information about alter via third parties. The bandwidth hypothesis states that gossip nework closure increases information flow reinforcing and fine-tuning trust relationships beneficial to social capital. The echo hypothesis states that gossip network closure does not so much increase information flow but reinforces dispositions. This is due to a commonly observed etiquette in informal conversations where third parties only reveal information about alter to ego that concur with ego's opinion of alter. The motivation for this etiquette are civility, efficiency, and the important role gossip plays in creating and maintaining relationships.

Analysis of survey network data of three study populations consisting of senior managers in a leading manufacturer of electronic components and computer equipment, of staff officers in two financial companies, and a bankers in the investment banking division of a large financial company shows that trust can develop within negative third-party ties ("an enemy of my friend is my enemy" or "a friend of my enemy is my enemy"), and distrust can develop within positive third-party ties ("a friend of my friend is my friend" or "an enemy of my enemy is my enemy") which is consistent with the echo hypothesis but not with the bandwidth hypothesis.

"Strong connection through third parties increases the probability of social reinforcement such that network closure creates echo, not accuracy. [...] Therefore, network closure does not facilitate trust so much as it amplifies dispositions, people cannot learn of what they do not already know" which negatively impacts social capital.

Hess and Ostrom detail the complex interdisciplinary definitions of "commons" and "public domain," establishing the discourse in the work of Scott Gordon in 1954 and Anthony Scott in 1955, who introduced economic analysis to fisheries, a natural resource that had traditionally been the domain of biologists. "Their two articles are credited with outlining the conventional theory of the commons." Hess and Ostrom also note the application of game theory as a way of rationalizing commons dilemmas in which "appropriation from common-pool resources is frequently represented as a one-shot or finitely repeated, Prisoner's Dilemma game. Since appropriators are viewed as being tapped in these dilemmas, repeated recommendations were made that external authorities must impose a different set of political regimes and property rights on such settings. Some recommended private property as the most efficient form of ownership. Others recommended government ownership and control. Ostrom and Hess note that the political-economy literature had, until recently, not considered the possibility that the appropriators of common pool resources would find ways to self-organize their use of the CPR. The ability to self-organize institutions for collective action that transform Prisoner's Dilemma games into Assurance Games, the obstacles to self-organization, and the strategies different groups have used to overcome these obstacles are the central themes of both Hess's and Ostrom's work. It is particularly important to note that Hess and Ostrom look to fisheries and irrigation arrangements precisely in order to bring empirical human reality to the abstractions of game-theoretic models. In turn, they use the principles that emerged from empirical observation to make theoretical models.

Hess and Ostrom emphasize that although all resources have other attributes, an important insight into the nature of public and private aspects of common pool resources can be gained by considering a matrix where excludability is plotted against subtractability: "Recognizing a class of goods that share these two attributes enables scholars to identify the core theoretical problems facing individuals whenever more than one individual or group utilizes such resources for an extended period of time. Using "property" in the term used to refer to a type of good, reinforces the impression that goods sharing these attributes tend everywhere to share the same property regime. As discussed below, this is certainly not the case."

Consider a two by two matrix in which the column on the left represents low subtractability and the column on the right represents high subtractacility. The row on top represents difficult excludability and the row on the bottom represents easy excludability. Comparing the rows and the columns, four combinations of attributes become visible:

• Goods that are low in subtractability and difficult to exclude appropriators are public goods such as sunset and common knowledge.
• Goods that are low in subtractability but easy to exclude are toll or club goods such as day-care centers or country clubs.
• Goods that are highly subtractable and difficult to exclude are common-pool resources such as irrigation systems and libraries.
• Goods that are highly subtractable but easy to exclude are private goods such as doughnuts and personal computers.

Different property regimes have been used with varying degrees of success in regard to each class of goods, from communal or state ownership to private ownership. Hess and Ostrom emphasize the situational importance of every human institution by disclaiming the possibility that rigorous analysis without reference to the actual situation can yield any formula for assigning a property regime to any particular class of goods: "Examples exist of both successful and unsuccessful efforts to govern and manage common-pool resources by governments, communal groups, cooperatives, voluntary associations, and private individuals or firms. Thus, no automatic association exists between common-pool resources with common-property regimes - or, with any other particular type of property regime." Together with attacking the confusion between the nature of a good and a property regime, Hess and Ostrom analyze the confusion between a resource system and the flow of resource units, the confusion between common-property and open-access regimes, and the confusion over what property rights are involved in "ownership."

Consideration of the governance of common pool resources, the authors note, moved from natural resource systems and human-made resources to such diverse goods as "surfer's waves, sports, national budgets, public radio, traditional music, indigenous knowledge, air slots, campus commons; urban commons [apartment communities and residential community associations, streets, parking places, playgrounds, reclaimed buildings etc.]; highways and transboundary transportation systems, the Internet [domain names, infrastructure, information, acceptable use policies]; tourism landscapes; cultural treasures; car-sharing institutions, garbage; and sewing.

Turning to the common-pool resource aspects of information, the authors distinguish between the interdependent but separate artifacts such as books, articles, web pages, databases, computer files; facilities such as private and public libraries and archives, digital libraries, e-print repositories, the Internet, or local-area networks; and content such as knowledge, information, and data.

For the past few centuries, a social machine has evolved to gather, store, and transmit knowledge; information stocks and flows are at the center of this enterprise. Until recent decades, scientific and scholarly information has been recorded, transmitted, and stored in journals, books, articles, academic and public libraries. Fair Use doctrine enabled libraries to provide inexpensive or free access to bodies of knowledge. The digitization of information and extension of copyright laws have brought about radical changes in the way scientific and scholarly knowledge is handled: "Since 1995, the development of distributed digital information through network browsers has radically c hanged many of the traditional institutions of scholarly communication. Research information is moving much faster and much farther, often bypassing the normal publication process. While it is true that recent commodification and privatization of research information threatens the future of libraries' freedom to collect and distribute information, it is only one part of the story. Recent legislation, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono extension Act, the proposed legislation of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), may all adversely affect the costs, access, and availability of scholarly information."

Libraries are threatened because the publishers of scholarly digital information are seeking more money and more control while library budgets shrink. Librarians such as Clifford Lynch and legal experts such as Lawrence Lessig and Jamie Boyle have analyzed the forces that could make public libraries and public scholarship into anachronisms like scribes and illuminated manuscripts. Hess and Ostrom point at a countermovement that counters enclosure through technologies that enable collective action:

"In great contrast with the new legislation increasing copyright and patent restrictions, encouraging contract over property law with the constraints of embedded licensing agreements, is the international E-prints "revolution" that is making scholarly research freely accessible in unprecedented ways. The movement officially began with the mounting of arXiv.org at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Developed in 1991 by physicist and information specialist Paul Ginsparg, it was designed to serve as a repository for digital papers in physics and mathematics. By 1993, the site had received around 500 submissions. By September 30, 2001, the site had received 174,842 submitted papers. "The papers are free but unrefereed, requiring scholars themselves to judge the accuracy and quality of the work. This archive is the first that actually changes the representation and visibility of the scholarly record. The average number of site users range from 60,000 to 160,000 per day." There are hundreds of other digital archives. The Digital Library of the Commons http://dlc.dlib.Indiana.edu/ is both an e-print repository for self-archiving as well as a traditional digital library. An example of an effective grassroots initiative is that taken by the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization of scientists dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible "for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good."