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Networks Frame Introduction
Networks Frame Introduction
Humans exchange ideas and goods between and within our communities. This sharing happens through systems called networks.
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
The video begins with a philosophical statement common to the Zulu people of southern Africa. What idea does this statement express?
How did networks expand during the period from 1200-1450?
What transformations in networks have occurred in the period from 1450-1750?
In the past two hundred years, in the period from 1750-1914, how have new technologies helped develop networks that spread ideas rapidly?
According to the video, what are some of the unexpected consequences of growing interconnection?
The video ends with several questions. What problems does it suggest people might have within the new sorts of networks?
: Humans are social animals.
: We need contact with other humans to live and thrive.
: Over time our species has developed patterns of connections between and among people and their communities.
: We call these our networks of interaction.
: Networks link populations of people,
: allowing those living in different communities to move and share ideas, material goods,
: and crops, and animals, and pathogens, and even people.
: We communicate across and through our networks.
: Sometimes what moves through and across networks are physical items, like clothing or food.
: But sometimes they are concepts, like mathematics or religious beliefs.
: At times, networks encourage and enable people to cooperate with each other and they proved to be mutually beneficial.
: But at other times, networks caused competition and violence.
: And they allow for the spread of disease and decay.
: But for good or bad, progress or decline,
: human’s networks of interaction have been among the most enduring and significant features of our lives.
: And thus, they're a central factor in understanding historical change and how the present came to be.
: So developing a brief but big picture of major changes in human networks over our long history
: might help us as we study the human past, connect the past to the present, and face the future.
: How might we frame this story?
: Well, we might begin by pointing to the diverse world you’ll encounter in Unit 2.
: In the year 1200 CE, most people lived local lives, and other societies were often distant and different.
: But long-distance and regional networks did expand during this period.
: The great Mongol Empire grew in the thirteenth century,
: enabling an intensification of long-distance trade along the silk roads in Afro-Eurasia.
: Trade across the expanses of the Indian and Pacific Oceans began to link far flung peoples together in networks of exchange.
: And in the Americas, overlapping regional trade networks moved luxury goods across vast distances.
: These larger “Old World networks” across Afro-Eurasia and the Americas meant that fewer and fewer people lived in isolation.
: And although these networks sometimes collapsed, people subsequently rebuilt and restructured them.
: These trade networks made possible the exchange of new ideas.
: Technologies like the magnetic compass, lateen sail, and gunpowder
: traveled west from China and the Islamic world along trade routes.
: European navigators and rulers made use of these technologies
: to establish the first transoceanic connections in Unit 3,
: connecting these two separate intercontinental networks.
: Humans brought them together to form the first truly global networks of interaction.
: Now this happened slowly at first,
: as the regions and communities of the world developed loose connections.
: Ideas, material goods, and people could now move around the globe,
: but they did so quite slowly.
: However, in the past 200 years—as you’ll see in Unit 5—
: new technologies such as newspapers, telegraphs, and then telephones, helped spread ideas rapidly.
: Steamships and trains moved people and goods faster and further than ever before.
: These innovations tightened up loose global networks,
: connecting more and more people, and more and more communities,
: and allowing us to share more and more ideas.
: Some of these ideas have sparked revolutions that spanned borders and continents.
: Others have driven the nations of the world into colonial competition and global conflict.
: Now it might seem from this narrative that networks have expanded in a smooth, straight line across the history of the last 800 years.
: But they didn't.
: Growing interconnection came with unexpected consequences.
: For example, the growth of long-distance trade networks in the Mongol Empire helped spread the bubonic plague.
: The thirteenth-century Black Death pandemic killed up to 200 million people and temporarily shrank Afro-Eurasian networks.
: In the Americas, the arrival of European conquerors also brought new diseases, like smallpox,
: that killed up to 25 million Indigenous Americans,
: shattering the regional trade networks that had once linked these societies.
: But despite these upheavals, the growth of networks has continued into the present.
: Today, the new global internet helps us share ideas, plans, and news with millions of people almost instantaneously.
: New innovations in transportation move people and goods anywhere in the world within days if not hours.
: It appears as if we are living in one vast global network of interconnection today
: —an issue that you’ll consider in Unit 9.
: For the first time, historians speak of humans living in a network
: —singular—rather than networks—plural.
: In this course, we have created a “tool” that we call the Networks Frame
: to help you remember and use this big story.
: Use this frame to help you think about changes in the human past and to situate events in the present.
: Use it to think about how or if these increasingly rapid and complex networks changed who we are.
: Does our global network give us meaning?
: Does being connected elevate us?
: Has it allowed us to create a shared sense of who we are?
: Or are we, in some ways, adrift in the vastness of our worldwide web?
: Answering these questions requires us to understand how networks have shaped—and been shaped by—people, across the global past.