Network Scientists Discover the 'Dark Corners' of the Internet 99
KentuckyFC writes "Network theorists have always simulated the spread of information through the internet using the same models epidemiologists use to study the spread of disease. Now Chinese scientists say this isn't quite right--it's easy to infect everybody you meet with a disease but it's much harder to inform all your contacts of a particular piece of information. So they've redone the conventional network simulations assuming that people only ever transmit messages to a certain fraction of their friends. And their results throw up a surprise. In these models, there are always individuals or clusters of individuals who are unreachable. These people never receive the information and make up a kind of underclass who eke out an information-poor existence in a few dark corners of the network. That has implications for organizations aiming to spread ideas who will have to think more carefully about how to reach people in these dark corners. That includes marketers and advertisers hoping to sell products and services but also agencies hoping to spread different kinds of messages such as safety-related information. It also raises the interesting prospect of individuals seeking out the dark corners of the internet, perhaps to preserve their privacy or perhaps for more nefarious reasons."
Not internet (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, by "internet" they mean social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the interpersonal communication between people. Second, they have created a simulation, but it's not clear how it actually correlates to the real world. The key thing is they have the concept of "exhausting" sources, so once a person has communicated something, they won't receive or communicate that information again. Obviously that's not the case in the real world, because some people are more interested in certain pieces of information and will continue propagating them much longer than others, potentially seeding enough to compensate for the "exhaustion" of other average users.
Further, social networks all have a backlog where previous posts can be viewed (particularly true with FB), thus a person still "transmits" a given piece of information indefinitely as other people view their wall going back far in time. Thus it is always possible for a "dark corner" of the "internet" to always catch up by seeing a piece of information in that way instead of only real-time.