Reading Summary and Reaction

Summary
A 15 year old boy from Canada (who decided to call himself Mafiaboy online) surprised the world by hacking numorous computers and attacking the world widely known site, Yahoo. Barbasi compares this situation with Paul, a man who went from place to place to spread Christianity, and made this his life-long activity. Barbasi insists that the similarity between the two is that they "both use the power of social or computer networks" to achieve what they had done.


My Reaction
I thought this reading was very much interesting in the way that it compared two people who were different in age, achievement, and the time they lived in, and yet saught similarity between the two for using social network. I thought this vision was very unique. I agree to Barbasi that we do live in a world where we can not exist without interacting with someone else, and the strange thing is that most of the people who we interact with today may be people who we have never met or seen. Back in the days when Paul lived, the people who they interacted with might have been people they see everyday in the market place....but how many of us today know who made the wheat and corn of the cereal bowl we had this breakfast? Who was the person driving the bus that we rode to school this morning? We are all linked, and we all co-exist with the help of others. But I feel that we barely know anything about these links we are connected to. Now with the internet spreading over the world, it is even easier to achieve something with the help from another who you dont know about - and we may not even have to move from our seats! What we trade and move around is information, data, and paper money. But before we get too involved with these, I think we should stop for once, and reconsider the dangers that may lie ahead, and also learn more about our social community/ network we belong in.