The technological network and the social network

There was an article in Wired online magazine about how the U.S. military has changed tactics for securing the Iraqi countryside.  The article explained how the usual brute force wasn’t going to cut it this time, and a new tactic was needed to keep the villages free of insurgents.  Apparently the problem, explained by the various villages, was that the troops were not providing adequate security, leading to the siege by foreign fighters.  Not long before this revelation, the military had a vast technological network setup that included live deployment locations and past incidents all merged to inform the viewer.   What they really lacked was the bridge between the information and the people who really needed it, the people who lived in the villages.

The first network, as far as we know, was built a long time ago in a pool of liquid.  Organisms banded together through mutual survival by communicating.  A form of stimulus-response behavior prompted them to react to certain outside threats and they were able to sound the alarm to hunker down and prepare for battle.  Therefore it’s no surprise to see the same behavior in all forms of life today.  The cities, states, and countries all subscribe to these very same communication structures for survival.  The postal system, telegraph, and telephone networks are all modern examples of the need for providing for the people a means to communicate information that is time sensitive.  The internet as we all know it is the most recent of these networks to be implemented and used for that very same purpose.

Both networks are certainly mutually exclusive of the other, as they can both be utilized for similar tasks, but the real power of utilization includes the use of both for the same ends.  As discovered by our military in Iraq for securing the towns and villages, and here in the United States for creating grassroots campaign efforts to elect future presidents, the two can prove to be quite indispensable.  Traditionally for a presidential campaign  volunteers will go door to door and hand out pamphlets with a limited amount of text packed into them.  Todays campaigns enjoy the merging of these networks by allowing the door to door people to drop a website onto the people they wish to impress, and at their leisure they can view video of the candidate as if he were sitting in their living rooms.