Micro vs. Macro: themes of Web science

Four important themes of Web Science are

  • Micro: an individual acts
  • Macro: the world responds (or not) to an individual's action
  • Synthetic: something is created to produce a desired result
  • Analytic: laws are stated to explain observed phenomena

We focus on these themes as they apply to Web builders -- people who contribute links and other content to the Web:

 Synthetic
Analytic
Micro
An individual builds a Web
site to produce a desired result.
(We do not speak
to this quadrant.)
Macro
"The world" builds a Web site
to produce a desired result.		Laws are stated to explain
large-scale Web phenomena.

Some Web builders consider themselves Web developers; others consider themselves bloggers; others merely post an occasional comment on someone else's blog or discussion forum. We say "Web builder" to encompass the full spectrum of people who contribute links and other content to the Web.

Our lab curriculum provides an informal hands-on approach to the task of building a Web site. Our Search and Share pages help Web builders leverage collectively engineered resources (such as WordPress). The formal chapters of the Study page (which you are now reading) explain large scale Web phenomena; they also explain the Amazon recommendation algorithm and the Google PageRank algorithm. 

The sociology, psychology, and economics of this course follow Duncan Watts' Six Degrees, which we recommend as a narrative companion to our own material. Our complete suggested reading list is below.

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