Information and Networks

I think the network law that I agree with the most would be Sarnoff's Law, because it is the simplest and has the most concrete definition of "value" compared to the other two laws. The way the Metcalfe and Reed laws calculate value is very unclear, so I am not sure that those laws would accurately determine what "value" a station has. Sarnoff's concept takes the idea of "value" and puts it in the most basic of formulas; the more viewers you have, the more value you have.

Though I definitely think there is more to value than how many people are watching/listening to your program, the Sarnoff Law is probably has the most accurate way of calculating how much something is worth in a monetary sense. When trying to figure out how much ad time for your station during a given program, calculating the price based off of how many people are watching seems to make the most sense to me. Of course, there are other aspects that can contribute to value, such as how well the typical viewer/listener pays attention to your program, this linear approach stands as a good starting point for better laws to base themselves off of in the future.

And speaking of the future, it is difficult to predict how people will get their information then, even in five years time. The best guess that I can make is that we will (somehow) be even more connected to each other than we are now. Almost all of our technology revolves around networks in this day and age, and is becoming harder and harder to be truly independent of one another. I believe that we will soon see “Internet Everywhere,” with virtually any place having a network connection. In that same sense, I believe that nearly all of our devices will be connected to each other in some way to maximize the potential in how we can communicate with each one another. If technological innovation mirrors social media patterns in any way, then networks are going to become a major part of how we live.