Learning about Networks the hardway

I have dealt with many issues in my life but never as many as I have upon entering this university. I always considered networks as the interaction between two or more human entities in dealing with specific issues. Reading Franda's Launching into Cyberspace and I was more in the mindset that networks could also include the action of a nation in the creation of industrial policies, culture norm enforcement and creation by way of contra-flows and self-regulation. But upon reading Amelia Arsenault's "Networks emerging frameworks for analysis, I have learned of a new form of networks, were the actors aren't always human.

Hence back to my person experience were I learned first hand how to interlocking nodes function and just how interlocked I am with the device known as the computer. I have learned that I use it as a mediary, not an intermediary, to display or transmit my meaning to the rest of my network including my professors and fellow classmates. By having two computers crash on me with thirty minutes of one another. I learned right then and there the "principle of generalized symmetry"that my computer as an inanimate object functionally exhibits as much agency as I (the human) do.

Upon the break down I was left scrambling to deduct a way to contact professors and other human relations in my network only to realize that my "power" or ability to affectively induce a message was severally hampered by this primary facilitator going down and that my next alternative was to call upon more inanimate objects such as the cellphone and USBs along with the physical act of dropping by the offices of the people I direly need to contact.

Thus, the Network through my experience of it is as Arsenault put it, a "mercenary", especially in its ability to exclude an individual that fails to adapt to a situation but also if that individual is unable to connect in one or more ways. So moral of this story, be wary of ones reliance on a particular inanimate object in ones network, it may opt personally or unintentionally to exclude you from the living part of your network that you are connected to.