Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

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Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 · rating details · 1,561 ratings · 144 reviews

A cocktail party? A terrorist cell? Ancient bacteria? An international conglomerate?

All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. Albert-László Barabási, the nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks and author of Bursts, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are m...more

Paperback, 304 pages

Published April 29th 2003 by Plume (first published 2002)

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Apr 17, 2009 Trevor rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: economics, philosophy, psychology, social-theory, science

I liked this very much. The main thesis is that science up to fairly recently has been Platonic (which this book instead, and I think mistakenly, characterises as reductionist) and therefore fixated on describing things and their forms. This idea is that if you have a picture you want to study you will learn all that there is to learn about it by pulling all of the jigsaw pieces apart and studying these individual pieces in detail. As String Theory shows, we can always speculate on smaller and s...more I liked this very much. The main thesis is that science up to fairly recently has been Platonic (which this book instead, and I think mistakenly, characterises as reductionist) and therefore fixated on describing things and their forms. This idea is that if you have a picture you want to study you will learn all that there is to learn about it by pulling all of the jigsaw pieces apart and studying these individual pieces in detail. As String Theory shows, we can always speculate on smaller and smaller component parts, but it is not clear that gaining a detailed knowledge of all of these parts will inevitably tell us all there is to know about how these parts work in unison.

The author makes it clear that he views that the path of science will be away from what he calls reductionism (and I would call a Platonic obsession with ‘things’) towards a deeper understanding of how these components already more or less described in detail work together in networks of relationships to bring about complex and emergent behaviours and phenomena. I have a fundamental faith that any view that turns our attention away from ‘things’ and towards relationships is pointing us in the right direction.

He uses a very broad palette here to make his point, taking examples from computer science, biology, economics and sociology to build a fascinating case for the role played by networks in assisting our understanding of how the world works. He also makes some fascinating points regarding the development of network theory and how that development has been away from notions of randomness towards much more highly structured and law driven networks.

Sorry, that wasn’t clear. He spends a lot of time in this book discussing in very clear prose the problems which have confronted mathematicians when they have sought to describe networks. The earliest models of networks assumed that the links between nodes on the network were more or less random. What has been found since is that networks follow power laws in which they tend to follow Matthew 13:12 “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath,”

Much of the sociological implications of networks is much the same as is discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. But you still may want to read this even if you have read that book, as this does give much more background to network theory and therefore helps to make more sense of some of the conclusions drawn in Gladwell’s book. Also, the examples drawn from other sciences, not least computer science, gives an interesting insight into the growing importance of network theory in understanding the world.

In a previous life I would have had a better understanding of power series and therefore a deeper understanding of how networks are shown to be less random and more law driven – but in this book such an understanding of mathematics is not assumed nor needed to follow the argument. (Was that a collective sigh of relief I could hear?) At no time did I feel like I was looking down over the abyss of my mathematical ignorance and thinking, “God, if only I’d stuck at it I might even be able to follow what this guy is on about”. He is always clear and makes no assumptions of the reader’s numeracy or intelligence, other than that the reader possessing some threshold level of literacy. And, to be honest, even this wasn’t set too high.

There was also a very interesting discussion and explanation of the Pareto Principle which I think in itself made the book worthwhile. This is the rule that one hears far too often from people who have an Masters of Business Administration (or a masters of bugger all as a friend of mine refers to them). The notion that we get 80% of our sales from 20% of our customers being the MBAs Pareto Relation of choice. He says that this rule is not as all pervasive as MBAs would have us believe. Rather, it only is the case in specific situations and this was the most interesting thing in the book, for me. Generally, we would expect things to be ordered around a normal distribution – with height, for example, there are lots of average height people, but far fewer very tall or very short people. The Pareto Principle instead follows a power rule and, as he points out, applies when a system is moving from randomness to an organised state. I would love to read more about this, but this was the first time I have heard someone talking about this relation and I didn’t think – Well, so what?

What was most interesting about this book, though, was what was not talked about. He talked about computer networks, he talked about the network relationships within plant and animal cells, but what wasn’t mentioned at all throughout the book (and I expected to hear about it at any moment) was a discussion of that most intriguing of networks, the neural networks in the brain. I wonder if this is because how we describe these neural networks is generally with reference to computer, highway or other human made networks and the metaphor doesn’t really work going the other way around.

There is lots to think about in this book – and like I said, given that it moves us some way from Plato’s world of forms towards notions that everything is connected to everything else makes this book worth reading. I think it is clear that these connections, impulses and directings and how they are played out when one set of a web of interactions impacts upon other parts of that web are worth both our notice and our study.
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Jul 29, 2007 Rachele rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: physics, partially-read

This is great stuff. A very sexy topic as far as physics is concerned. And while that may be just a cliche description that I'm fond of using- sex is actually a relevant topic in the field of networks. Did you know that a sexual network has the same topological structure as the world wide web? Well it does! Prostitutes are like google and your personal website is probably like a virgin. Anywho, while the content is extremely interesting, if you have any prior knowledge of networks, you might fin...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Arin Basu rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Arin by: from a course.

This is an excellent introduction to the world of social network analysis. Very easily written for an introductory audience and introduces all the essential concepts, yet an excellent treatise on the more intricate and state of the art issues around social network analysis. It's always a pleasure to read firsthand accounts from the authors of the power-law distribution in social networks, the issues around growth models, and preferential attachments.

The book goes over a range of issues, startin...more

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Jan 18, 2009 Robert rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: business

This is an excellent read. It isn't filled with much technical speak and is written in a very easy to read manner. The flow of the book is also very good.

I found this book far more enjoyable than 'Sync' which I found hard to follow at times, even though both books deal with similiar subject material. Barabasi has created something here that anyone can read and understand.

In summary the book looks at network theory and the discoveries that have been made recently that change the manner in which w...more

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Mar 10, 2012 Glenn Robinson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Very impressed with this book on how people, organizations and other things are linked. We have all heard of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, yet the author writes it is less than 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon. Using the internet to find the connections of networks, the studies have improved. The first study of the power of networking can go back to St Paul and the spread of Christianity. Later examples are the Air France Flight Attendant who spread AIDS, the many internet viruses and the 9/11 terrorists. U...more

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Sep 13, 2011 Gendou rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, mathematics

One of those anti-reductionist, complexity-obsessed, nonsensical collections of persuasive anecdotes and loose (useless) analogies.

The main critique of reductionism is that it not always useful.
Some problems can't be easily solved from 1st principles.
The author points out the solution would be a departure from reductionism.

But this straw-man strict reductionist doesn't exist in the first place.
Rocket scientists don't model engines on the quark-scale!
Barabasi works hard to hide the freedom and ut...more

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Aug 12, 2009 Chicgeekgirl21 rated it 3 of 5 stars

Linked is about the history of thought concerning human and technology networks. Barabasi uses anecdotes and understandable language to guide the reader through concepts such as "hubs and nodes" and how the idea of "6 degrees of separation" is actually applicable to real-life human relationships.

If my explanation of the book is a little hard to follow, it's probably because the book itself is somewhat hard to follow. Vascillating between mildly interesting and kinda boring, Linked is hardly a c...more

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Dec 30, 2008 Tad Coles rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book’s author explores networks that exist in everything from Hollywood actors to cellular proteins and lets us into the private (and unexpectedly exciting and humorous) world of mathematicians and physics professors. The 80/20 rule is described as it applies to monetary success by people, web site success with Internet traffic, frequency of protein use in cellular reactions, and evolutionary success of DNA mutations. Be forewarned, the chapter on network economy will not be calming at this...more

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Feb 01, 2009 Anoush Margaryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

An interesting book, looking at the math behind networks. There is a major gap in Barabasi's exploration of the subject - it doesn't consider the human rationalities behind networks. Why do we link to X and not Z? He offers the concept of preferential attachement but doesn't question the rationalities behind such preferences.

What are the underpinning motives and goals that bring people together in networks? Sociologists and sociocultural theorists (eg Karin Knorr-Cetina, Jyri Engestroem) have be...more

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Sep 01, 2007 Julie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Similar to "The Tipping Point" -- it's more academic and uses examples beyond social settings, and takes some of the same ideas further in more depth. Not quite as accessible as The Tipping Point, but also more realistic and less 'romanticizing' of the science.

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Mar 05, 2013 Jason Griggs rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book has a lot of interesting information about the structure of the Internet. Unfortunately, it was poorly written. It reiterates simple points and fails to spend enough time explaining the complex points. The author seemed to have in mind certain phrases that had to appear in the book and includes these and strange metaphors in places where they don't fit. It also goes off on too many tangents about the publication process of university professors. I listened to the book on CDROM, and it...more

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Sep 27, 2009 Barrett Brown rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: reference, magick-parapsychology-anthropology, espionage

Interesting enough, though repetative. A pop-cultural textbook for very complicated mathematics/statistics, but never-the-less very relevant and very interesting. The first half of the book builds the groundwork for the information explained in the second half, though for the most part the book just repeats the same concepts over and over (maybe needed for something so compicated).

To be honest I already had intuitively come to some of the same conclusions these mathemeticians and physicists came...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Taylor Ellwood rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: business, psychology

Linked explores how networks are formed across a variety of perspectives ranging from urban development to in-person networking to the internet. I must admit, I'd be fascinated to see what the author would say about social networks, but this book was written before they were developed. With that said, this book provides some fascinating information on how networks are formed and maintained as well as giving some consideration on how people can understand and work with networks better. It's a use...more

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Jul 23, 2010 Jasmine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Loved it. It is a great popular science book about the science of networks. You can feel the author's excitement as he goes through the history of how we started with static graphs, then came random graphs but somehow they still did not explain our world. Then it was back to more research in studying networks, building models, analyzing data till finally they came up with a model which explains how networks form and work. And of course, networks are found everywhere: social networks, cellular (b...more

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May 12, 2011 Keith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not sure it lived up to it's title, particularly the "And What It Means", and not sure they showed that everything is connected to everything else. But that was probably what the publisher came up with.

This is a 10,000 foot view of the topic. Not enough that you could do anything on it on your own, but enough to let you know if you would be interested enough to dig deeper. And, while I think there are references to other texts that one can read to be able to dig deeper, it is not very clear.

For...more

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Dec 15, 2008 Christina rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, science

This took me a long time to finish. It was hard to stay interested, especially when they were talking about the internet. Even though the book isn't that old, it felt quite dated. I get that the early days of the internet were exciting in figuring out how the networks worked, but they kept sounding really surprised that some web pages have more links to them than others, a fact to which any person NOT entrenched in the network theory mindset would have said, "yeah, well, duh."

I was most interes...more

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Feb 20, 2008 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science, non-fiction, business-economics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. My notes:

Barabasi is a physicist who works on the composition and structure of networks and complex systems. The book goes into many specific examples of networks we experience everyday and how they work. Hey goes through the history of graph theory and how it led to the formulation of complex networks as completely random creations (where every node had an equal chance of linking to another node). He and his associates, however, discovered that the networks are not random and follow a pattern o...more My notes:

Barabasi is a physicist who works on the composition and structure of networks and complex systems. The book goes into many specific examples of networks we experience everyday and how they work. Hey goes through the history of graph theory and how it led to the formulation of complex networks as completely random creations (where every node had an equal chance of linking to another node). He and his associates, however, discovered that the networks are not random and follow a pattern of giant hubs with the majority of links connecting to each other through these hubs. One of his specific areas of research is the internet and how it follows this pattern. Furthermore, these "scale free" networks follow power laws (i.e., they do not correspond to a normal curve). As a result of this structure, the few extremely large hubs in each system are responsible for almost all of the change, influence, etc.

He also goes into the degrees of separation in people (6 for any two people in the world, 3 for any 2 actors in Hollywood) and among web pages (19 clicks between any two pages). He also mentions the 80/20 rule, which states that in many systems 20% of people do 80% of the work, 20% of criminals commit 80% of all crimes, etc. There are a number of characteristics that determine whether a node will become a hub, and once achieved, whether it will continue to grow or fail: 1) growth 2) preferential attachment. He also mentions that although many systems have several large hubs, some systems can only have one hub, which he calls "winner take all" (e.g., microsoft). One of the things that determines the longevity and growth of a hub is the "fitness" of it's links.

He then goes into the vulnerabilities of scale free networks and how they can be damaged. Even though random failure of links does little to damage a scale-free network, calculated attacks on the large hubs of networks can result in a cascading failure. This has occurred in networks like the internet, the U.S. power grid, and the human cell. He also mentions many of the same examples used in the Tipping Point: the spread of AIDS, fads, and many other social phenomena. He goes into many specifics about the web as well, specifically how it is difficult to get from certain parts of the web to other parts. There is a central core filled with large hubs, through which you can get to the Out continent, and to which all of the nodes from the In continent point; but there are also Islands that do not have links to central hubs or the Out or In continent. These are extremely difficult to find through the process of linking through random pages.

He then goes into scale-free networks within the human body and the ramifications they have for fighting disease and mapping the network of our genes and DNA. He also treats the economy as a scale-free network that can be understood as a series of networks with a few hubs and many more small links. Overall he posits the idea that scale-free networks are part of many of the large systems we interact with everyday and understanding them will allow us to predict how and when they will form and protect the important systems that already exist (e.g., the internet).
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Oct 19, 2012 Dan Chuparkoff rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: economics, futurism

At first when I started reading this, I aborted. It was written in 2002 and the author doesn't yet know about things like Facebook. However, I recently picked it back up and I'm really glad I did. There's some really interesting stuff in here about the non-randomness of networks. 'Linked' begins to allude to some of the things discussed in Gladwell's Tipping Point but from a mathematical and science perspective. It's a great companion to Tipping Point. If you read one, read them both.

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Dec 26, 2012 Ian Billick rated it 4 of 5 stars

A good book for the mathematically inclined. The author does a good job of bringing fairly abstract concepts to life. At times, he left my wanting more, with a sense that he had only skimmed the surface, but that is a good thing. My only criticism, which is minor, is that there seemed to be confusion between mechanism and mathematical description, something which seems all too common with mathematicians.

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Nov 22, 2012 Atila Iamarino rated it 5 of 5 stars

O tipo de livro que coloco ao lado do The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood do James Gleick na categoria "livros que fazem sua visão de mundo mudar". Recomendo o Linked para qualquer pessoa que trabalhe com ciência ou com relacionamentos humanos ou entre qualquer variável. A noção de como redes são construídas e funcionam, de sites a pessoas, ou mesmo proteínas, e como as propriedades que explicam este tema são relevantes para tudo que fazemos.

Embora seja de 2002 e esteja um pouco defasa...more

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Jul 07, 2010 Tommy Powell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wonderful and refreshing combination of concepts and practical mathematical models. Barabasi provides a Power Law that supports his theory that all networks -social, biological, computer, etc...- will always grow, perform, and atrophy in the same way.

Just look at how Google does, and does not, index websites -and how your Facebook page does, and does not, grow or die.

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Sep 10, 2009 David marked it as to-read

Recommended to David by: Tom Wentz

From Tom Wentz on 9/4/2009 "Caution: As Dr Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Professor Notre Dame University, in his book Linked, 2002 states, “Arriving at Mass Customization does not depend upon our intelligence to find the path within the Mass Production Business Model" The "intelligence" within the Industrial Age Business Model does not contain the answers. It matters now how "smart" the current management team is. Said another way, the intelligence, the brilliance that was designed into "jet planes" w...more

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Jul 03, 2012 Karyn marked it as to-read

Has anyone read this who can tell me something about it? I'd looked at his second book, "Bursts," in an airport, and it looked interesting, but it got abysmal reviews here. These reviews are the opposite, and I was hoping to get a handle on why before I add anything to my alarmingly long- and continually growing- list of books-to-read.

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Jan 27, 2009 Jon rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-abandoned-in-09

Couldn't quite get into this one. I think it was the shift from academic discussions of networks which I didn't understand to practical implementations which were so simple as to not yield any value. Anyway, it might be right for someone but I wasn't feeling it and so I dumped it about half way in...

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Jan 16, 2013 C rated it 4 of 5 stars

In this bedside-reading introduction to network science, Barabasi offers a first-person intellectual history of the development of this exciting, growing interdisciplinary field of research. In addition to clearly explaining what must be complex mathematical concepts without using any numbers or equations whatsoever, Barabasi conveys an enthusiasm about the field that inspires the reader to want to learn more. But my favorite aspect of this book was the way Barabasi happily gives credit to the m...more

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May 11, 2009 Rafael Ernesto rated it 5 of 5 stars

Existen eventos de la naturaleza que se comportan como una red. Sus mecanismos de funcionamiento son propios y no bien comprendidos. Este libro ayuda a comprender esos mecanismos y los relaciona con ejemplos que permiten una mayor comprensión de los elementos complejos que subyacen en los detalles.

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Jan 05, 2009 Maheswaran rated it 5 of 5 stars

Amazing book about networks. Anyone can read this book. There is no need for any formal education about networks to read this book because this book is basically a collection of examples, stories, anecdotes, phenomena etc. of which the author makes sense - in a networks point of view.

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Mar 15, 2013 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Theory behind social network (network in general, actually). Got interested 'network' after reading about Facebook. Turns out the growth of Facebook (and internet om general) has rational explanation - Bose-Einstein condensation and Power Law. Written for general audience.

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Jun 04, 2012 Geert Hofman rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a nice introduction to network theory. The author writes from a very personal perspective and that makes it familiar and awkward at the same time. Sometimes it is as if you are invited into the personal realm of all the main players in this research arena. Quite a good read.

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Nov 28, 2010 Jackie C rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book when I first read it years ago. Now, I wonder if we're trying too hard: Is the goal of LinkedIn to link to as many people as possible, or to forge connections to people who share our interests and can inspire/amuse/entertain/inform me and enjoy the same from me?

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