Using the Golden Record song choice data to analyze connections was overwhelming at first. One of the first things I noticed was that track 4 seemed to be an outlier with only one edge. I immediately wonder why this song was only chosen by one person. Looking at my community I was grouped into I notice that there are several tracks with only one edge. Out of six people in the community there was only one person that had every song fully connected to another person.

This shows that although we think similarly regarding our track choices, we are not in total agreement with everyone else. This does represent the largest community out of the four groups. This tells me that these connections were the strongest and perhaps the tracks were also the most chosen. Systems Innovation (2015) identify that how connected a node is in the network determines its significance. We need to dig much deeper in order to determine what this significance is. Each person’s justifications must be explored in order to have an understanding of what the significance might be of these connections. It would be interesting to explore if our backgrounds are similar thus influencing our selection process.

When I compare my community to a smaller community, I notice that only 3 tracks were common among the three people in the community. This makes me wonder about the criteria people used for song selection and their justifications for how the tracks represented earth. The graphs do not provide the necessary information to answer these inquiries. The graph does provide a provocation for an inquiry.

This process made me reflect on how the algorithms on the web work and how they are ranking connections to create significance. There are many assumptions made in the process. To understand the ranking systems, one would need to have a certain amount of understanding of the company running the search engine (ex. Google, Bing, etc). By understanding the purpose of the company, one can begin to understand the significance of the connections and the search results. This is important as what is ranked high on the search results may be of little significance to the person doing the searching. This task has made me realize the importance of understanding how networks work as well as critically thinking about the information that is presented and asking questions about what is missing.

References

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 19). Network Connections. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/2iViaEAytxw