Clustering

In the hunter gatherer society people were living in closely knit social groups. In network theory we speak of highly clustered groups.

When different clusters exist within a large network, and you rewire some of the links within clusters to improve the connections between these clusters, information may travel faster through the network.

Today we have many more possibilities to connect people in different clusters than in the hunter gatherer society. Just think of how the inventions of writing, printing, telephony, radio, television and the internet each had an enormous impact in how ideas and news could spread through society. Average path length is a word used in network theory to express how many links are needed to make a connection between two random nodes in a network.