Humans are innately social creatures, since birth and a young age, our development is centred around connections with others – first familial relationships, and then larger social networks in which we belong. We thrive off such relationships, and when they’re removed that can lead to problems of loneliness, as we touched on in last week’s blog post.
e a vital part of human life. I’m not talking about Instagram or Twitter, but rather the more profound, timeless interpersonal bonds between people. For many, the pandemic, and global experiences of isolation and lockdowns, have illuminated the essential role these social networks play in our wellbeing.
I like to think of the mind as a network, a web of thoughts, ideas and memories that interconnect and weave together to create one whirring system. It is a network of ideas constantly buzzing between one thought and the next. We can often get lost in our mind as an insignificant thought can take you down a long and winding path that leads to great things or maybe just a dead end.
When I think of networks, I think of communities; the groups that we fit in with, sharing our experiences, values or beliefs. When communities and groups come together to protest, they can change minds, create action and produce networks.
Networks surround us on a daily basis, and they come in many shapes and forms. Our first thought when we hear the word ‘networks’ can be technological in nature, telephone networks, broadcasting networks, network cables, etc; however, there are other forms that networks can take such as the social networks we form within our communities and the ecological networks that shape our natural world.
My interpretation of ‘networks’ has been of the interconnection of experiences. How I remember my childhood in relation to my neighbours’ lives. And how an event such as a lockdown prompted me to start cooking a favourite dish that seemed far from reach, and in the process evoking memories of a childhood that was lived in close quarters to others, shaping an early understanding of what made me feel safe – the intimacy of a shared space, a collective presence, and the smells of cooking that call people home.
We are so used to networks being something accessible and mundane; in fact, we can’t help but be reminded of an image of the digital mechanism when we talk about ‘networks’. However, the network can also be an aesthetic subject – a topic about something bigger than us, something about how we came to being and live on in this universe.
When I think of networks, I start to snowball in my mind what that really means and where people find their own networks. Networks is such a broad topic; you can really work it into anything. So, whereabouts do you feel the essence of networks?
When I think of networks, I think of communities. And after more than eighteen months of COVID nothing has become more visible to me than the importance of my local community.
The theme of Sydney University’s 2021 Anthology is ‘Networks’. Students, staff and alumni are encouraged to interpret this theme in their own way. While we often associate the term ‘networks’ with technology and the ways we, as humans, connect with the help of technology, networks are also ever present in nature and the world around us. The natural world is made up of an incalculable number of complex systems, or networks, from a flock of birds, mushroom mycelium, schools of fish, ant hills and human brains. All these entities have a complex co-operative behaviour, the ability to pass information and energy, feedback, and hierarchal structures, or in other words, they are networks.