What Interests Me???

In order to learn how to collect an interesting and useful research from networks we have to chose a topic to research about. To be honest I have being struggling quite a lot with this matter, because it isn't easy to find something interesting and relevant enough to get people to talk about it and that also would embrace more than one group of people. We had some help in class where Sophie (my lecturer) shared with us a list of different subject areas. The problem with this list is that those "areas" are too open to base my research on them, so even though is helpful I still had to chose a topic within that "area".

Notebook

I though it would be interesting to upload pictures of some relevant pages from my notebook. Because this is where I take notes in class and also where I write my thoughts about the project before putting them into this blog. I also make some checklists and diagrams. Instead of writing all this stuff here (in the notebook), from now on I will do my best to write as much as I can on the blog, because by the way I only have a couple of weeks left!! But lets not fall into alarmist thoughts, I know exactly what I have to do in the few days. So yeah... Lets start putting some hard work into this module! 

a KIT-KAT please!!

As you all know a Kit-Kat is a well known chocolate bar, but in Spain (the country where I was born) we    also use it as an idiom. Yes, I know, this sounds weird, when we say in Spanish "wait a Kit-Kat" is like if we were saying "wait a moment". This has a very rational and simple explanation, Spanish people is not that crazy... Back when this brand started to be sponsored in Spain they were advertised like a break snak.  That is why we use it like that. Whatever, this isn't what I really intended to write in this post. I was checking for some inspirational reading for this blog and I found "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell in our recommended reading list for this module. To be honest it was the only book that I managed to find as an epub to load into my digital book reader.

The fact is that I find some of this book's theories very interesting, so decided to share it along with all my incoming research.

"The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea very simple. It is that the best way to understand de emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of a unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of work of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and the messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.

The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall of New York's crime rate are text book examples of epidemics in action. Although they may sound as if they don't have very much in commun, there share basic, underlying pattern. First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behaviour. No one took out an advertisement and told people that the traditional Hush Puppies were cool and they should start wearing them. Those kids simply wore the shoes when they went to clubs or cafes or walked the streets of downtown New York, and in so doing exposed other people to their fashion sense. They infected them with the Hush Puppies virus.[...] The second distinguishing characteristic of this two examples is that in most cases little changes had big effect.[...] Finally, both changes happend in a hurry. They didn't built steadily and slowly."

MY NETWORK DIAGRAM

This is the diagram I made of my personal connection with people. I ordered them from places I have lived.