In a recent (and ongoing!) debate about social connectivity/networking, Dan of the ever-interesting, idiosyncratic yet bold tdaxp gave a brief and general definition to social networking and connectivity:

A network is a system of entities that are related to each other. That is, objects A and B are networked if A can export information to B in such a way to change the behavior or state of B, or that B can export information to change the behavior or state of A. [Dan]

This is an outline I’ll want to explore in more detail later; in my response to his original offering here at Phatic Communion, I wrote the following:

I’ve been outlining social interaction by addressing individual interaction with ‘The World’ as a personal connection to that world, and many of my examples in previous posts have illustrated my point: I kick a ball, I ‘smell a flower’, etc. You say that Object A exports information ‘to Object B’ and vice versa, using these terms to describe individual humans, but wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that ‘Person A’ generally exports information to the non-human World, and then ‘Person B’ comes along and may or may not observe that World and take information from It? The insistence on a direct line of cause & effect, implied by your use of the preposition ‘to’ above, is a desire to view human interactions in terms of computer networks which are typically connected via a very direct line (phone, cables, etc.) [CGW]

I have also previously commented on the idea that we humans may build non-human networking tools, such as the Internet or even, perhaps, various cultural institutions (such as banks), and that we use these tools to step into and then back out of ‘network’ or connection.  (Implying with my comment that what are commonly called ‘social networks’ are really an illusion of connectivity; or, that whatever actual connections occur are brief and small in scope, ever-changing.)

I only bring these points up to introduce an odd bit of Phatic Communion trivia.  An older post recently received some comments — for a brief time, a few comments only before activity in that thread died down; but since the comments stopped coming, that post has begun receiving many more hits per day over the last few days:  ‘Ralph Peters Gets Creative’.  The subject of the post was the redrawn map of the Middle East proposed by Ralph Peters in the Armed Forces Journal.  Peters suggested a realignment of national borders in the ME to reflect ethnic and religious differences, as a necessary step to long term stability in the region.  (You can find the link to Peter’s essay by following the link above.  Also, you can find a neat animated gif of the suggested new borders.)

Three interesting points about the sudden visitor activity:

• In the last 24 hours, 4 separate visitors from Pakistan have viewed the page and one from the UAE — nations that would be affected by Peters’ suggestion.  Like the other visitors, they arrived at my site via a search engine and already had Ralph Peters and, usually, the title of his essay, ‘Blood Borders.’  In fact, the first commenter at that thread wrote from Turkey, another nation that would be affected — and he did not like what Peters had to say.
• Aside from the visitor from Turkey, none of the other recent visitors have commented on that post although they viewed it.  So much for ‘connectivity,’ eh?  Not even the most recent visitors from the U.S., Canada, the UK, or Greece deigned to leave a comment, for whatever reason of many potential reasons.  So this (like so many similar examples in my Blogospheric experience) does seem to support the notion that we export information to ‘the World’ in a general manner rather than directly to one another, much of the time. (I suppose this will hold out for many other types of activity or ‘exportation’ as well.)
  
• Mark Safranski of ZenPundit recently considered the interaction of ‘Complexity and Connectivity’ in a modern networked society as well as in a medieval society.  That post made me reconsider the implications of plural monoculturalism, a subject I first encountered at Gene Expression.  In Mark’s thread, I even took a leap and suggested that a ‘consilience-focused’ force might need to help break up the warring hierarchies (monocultures) in a failing civilization by developing broadly acceptable rule-sets.  I mention this now, because as I can see by the limited commenting on my post about Ralph Peters’ map —- and the generally limited commenting on Phatic Communion — many temporary and smallish ‘connections’ might not lead to consilience or the type of shared-ideology-based ‘connectivity’ I’ve been positing actually happens.  Ah well.  In any case, with Mark’s post and my comments there in mind, I suppose that Peters’ suggestion would prove disastrous, in the end.
  

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UPDATE 8-31-06: I’m still getting tons of hits from Pakistan. The place seems well-connnected, heh, and I suppose Barnett would say that’s a good thing while John Robb frets. Today, I discovered that my limited post on Ralph Peters’ essay was linked by a Pakistani web forum. Funny thing: the commenters are quick to call the map bullshit, say the map proves there is so much stupidity on the Internet, but themselves have probably not followed the link to Peters’ essay to see what the map is all about! Stupidity indeed. “Pakistan’s not even mentioned on the whole page!” one myopic, egocentric commenter moans. Ya gotta love it!